FROM LATEX TO JUPYTER: CONVERTING TRADITIONAL TO MODERN

Lecture notes nowadays are often provided as PDF documents generated by LaTeX or other word processors. These PDF documents, however, are designed primarily for print and not for screen presentations. Therefore there is no possibility to incorporate interactivity into such a document.

In difference, the jupyter platform aims to provide documents that are able to incorporate interactive elements into knowledge transfer. These documents are called notebooks. Incorporating interactivity into these notebooks is possible, because they are split into so called cells. These cells can either contain static information or source code from different programming languages, which can be directly execute within the notebook. The possibility of executing source code within the notebook allows for several enhancements, for the inclusion of multimedia elements or the incorporation of small quizzes to support the knowledge transfer.

Since, as already mentioned, most lecture notes already exist in a different format, switching to the jupyter platform would demand a huge workload if these lecture notes had to be converted manually. It seems that many lecturers dread this workload and therefore stay with their traditional lecture notes rather than switching to a modern platform like jupyter.

To overcome this hurdle, this paper presents the prototype of an automated workflow that can convert LaTeX sources to a notebook, which is usable on the jupyter platform.