The other day I mentioned the Central Germany Branch Easter workshop that I'm teaching this year, and I've had the list of dances for a while. Now that I've sent them and the lead tunes to the musicians in Japan, I can work on my own more detailed preparation.

The current plan is to compile a “workbook” which will contain the original descriptions of the dances (cut from PDF files or scanned from the physical books), plus cribs and diagrams from the database and my own personal notes and preparation. I'm aiming for a format that has the crib, diagram, and notes for a dance on the left-hand side and the original description on the right-hand side, so everything is together for easy reference.

I've collected all the original descriptions, and I've added a function to the Strathspey server which will take a volume of dance lists (such as the Easter workshop lists – there's one for each morning or afternoon “unit” plus a “strategic reserve” of dances to be used instead of more difficult ones from the regular schedule, or in the evenings) and return a YAML file containing information for every dance, in order, such as the dance name, type, set shape, source, formations, database URL, plus the text of the “preferred” crib and a URL for the “preferred” diagram. On my own computer I'm preparing another YAML file which contains, for every dance, my own notes like the teaching points I intend to stress, a “plan of attack” for teaching the dance including skills exercises, and notes on the background for various dances (Who was Mary Erskine? What does the title “Seagreen” mean with reference to Paris?).

I have a Python program which will read these YAML files and generate a LaTeX input file that compiles a PDF file for the actual book (together with the PDF pages containing the original instructions, the downloaded diagrams for the dances, and so on). Since I have ABC files for all the lead tunes of the dances – as far as there are any –, I can also add an “incipit” (a line of musical notation giving the first four bars of the tune) so I can remind myself what the tune is like. Of course, this being LaTeX, additional niceties like a table of contents (that is automatically always up to date), a dance index, and a formation index are either “free” or can be added with comparatively little trouble.

All of this means that I now have PDF for a 130-page book with everything I should need for my classes. No hauling a huge pile of books, and rummaging around stacks of notes to find stuff. I'm going to hold off printing and binding the PDF almost until Easter just in case there are last-minute additions and changes – it's very enlightening to teach some of these dances in Frankfurt to see whether the lesson plans actually work (as they say, “no plan survives the first contact with the enemy”).

It's also been very satisfying to flex my LaTeX muscles once again. Now that I no longer use it daily for my job, I haven't done a lot of LaTeX work lately – mostly SCD workshop fliers and other untypical material, and the odd dance description every now and then –, so it's great to work on an actual book for a change. We've surely come a long way since my first steps with LaTeX in the 1980s – my new computer runs through both the Python and LaTeX parts of preparing the 130-page class workbook in less than 3 seconds, and that is blazingly fast compared to the good old Atari ST. It's also been fun to look at some new fonts and work out a good design for the book.

I'm also considering what other parts of my teaching might profit from the “workbook” style of preparation. It's probably too much hassle for the weekly class – SCDDB dance lists serve me well for that –, but I could see myself compiling workbooks for balls or for the biannual VHS taster courses I'm teaching. It could also be interesting to “pre-prepare” likely dances for use in the weekly class, to have an alphabetised folder of “leaf{}lets” although in that case the main page with the dance information, crib, and diagram would be on the front and the corresponding original description on the back.

Unfortunately this is probably not something that will become generally available to Strathspey users. I no longer run LaTeX on the Strathspey server (I used to do that for some services like the 8-page foldable programme booklets, but these are now done much quicker and with less effort via bespoke Python code based on the PyMuPDF library), so using this would mean having a local LaTeX installation, plus a Python interpreter to run the compilation scripts. It would be doable for geeky types who don't mind getting their hands dirty, so if you're interested, let me know.