Blog 4: Septmeber 19th

Let's do a high-level overview of "an authoring and publishing system for authors of textbooks, research articles, and monographs, especially in STEM disciplines." which is called Pretext. As stated in the pretextbook.org website the publishing system is targeted for scientific and textbook-heavy fields. As we all know writing a research paper or publishing something that is STEM-related can be tedious because there are certain rules, and regulations that one needs to follow. Pretext is a markup language, and allows the author to take advantage of the features included within it. One of the big plus of pretext is that it frees up author's mind from having to focus on how the content is displayed, and just focus on the actual content. As technologies are getting more advanced by the day, it can be difficult to keep up and maintain the published content which is another reason why Pretext is convenient. The software of Pretext "keeps up with technical advances and the introduction of new formats". It is always hard to adjust to something that is new, so if an author has extensive experience with word processors such as Google doc, word, and pages, it can be an adjustment to switch over to a markup language such as Pretext. The technicalities of Pretext can seem unfamiliar and might seem like extra work to just display the content, and might even seem easier if the writer had just used a regular text editor, but the long-run benefits of this type of markup language will pay off. As an author that is looking to publish their STEM related work using Pretext they will become a part of an open-source community. The open-source community of Pretext is a little different from the ones that I personally know. I am a part of an open-source community for Berea College's CELTS website, and the community is pretty small because we rarely get outsiders who are not a part of the Student Software Developer's team to contribute, so I assume that Pretext community will be on a much larger scale since it is used for many different reasons such as articles, research papers, textbooks, etc that are within STEM field.