Interactive text and figures

This project provides quick starting point for anyone who wants to experiment with interactive text and figures in their electronic publications (EPUB3 / HTML5 + JavaScript). One possible reason why one would use interactive text and figures is to communicate many possible stories to the audience, instead of usual single story line. See Physics World blogpost.

Two templates and corresponding tools are provided. Tools generate HTML/Javascript output that can be seen in web-browsers and e-readers. Generated examples don't have any external dependencies that need to be downloaded from the Internet. They are completely self contained, and be seen on all devices (even without Internet access), and they can be simply included in interactive texts/books in EPUB3 format, as well as web-pages.

For detailed documentation and discussion of motivation and examples check here

---

Note on implementation

Interactive text example implements simple calculations in JavaScript. More complex calculations should be precalculated and provided as look-up tables.

Interactive figures generate figures for all possible combinations of the input. Control JavaScripts then displays just images corresponding to selected combination of input parameters, while all other images are hidden. This can make files relatively large, but it allows their viewing on devices with minimal computational resources, like ereaders, and old phones.

License

Overall license is BSD-3-Clause as outlined included in LICENSE.md.

This project uses TangleKit package from this repository for creating interactive text. That package is based on on slightly modified and updated open-source Tangle.js library of Bret Victor.

Interactive figures use Matplotlib Python package and ifigures package from this repository which is based on updated and modified version of ipywidgets-static. Compared to original package, dependency on IPython is removed, Python 2 and 3 are supported now, and few bugs are fixed.

Licenses are inherited from the original projects mentioned above. They are permissive, and allow reuse, with or without modification, but for details check corresponding LICENSE files and code headers.