Text replacements to reduce workload and increase uniformity

Rationale

I often find myself writing the same text over and over, especially when making my content look nice. For example:

• Dividers between headings

• The opening html above some text to make that text into a nice bubble or a button using Droplets, and then the closing.

Basically, I want to write that longer more technical text once, and then just specify where it should be inserted. I’m describing a super rudimentary macro system. I implemented one in markdown2canvas so that my dividers and styles could be easily changed across an entire course simply by changing the definition of the replacement.

Setup

At root level in the folder for the course, in a subfolder called _course_metadata, make a file called replacements.json. Note that the name of this is arbitrary, and you can specify the name of the default replacements file in _course_metadata/defaults.json. Now, without having to specify it in the meta.json for content, you’ll gain access to those replacements.

Note that _course_metadata/replacements.json is just a regular old JSON file. Keys are what gets removed, and values are what goes in the key’s place. If your replacements use double quotes, you’ll have to escape them.

Usage

Custom text replacements per-content

Content can override which replacements file is used, say in case you want all your assignments of a certain type to use one style, and the pages of another type to use their own. It’s easy.

In the meta.json for the content you want to use the non-default replacements file, specify the key-value pair ‘replacements’:’path/to/custom_replacements.json’