Contributing to QuantEcon Lectures

The QuantEcon Lectures has three different lecture series each have their own repository

Building notebooks

All lecture source files are written in reStructuredText. To build a jupyter notebook from these files we use Jupinx. A jupinx tutorial is available here.

Style Guide - Writing Conventions

If you wish to contribute to these any lecture series, there are a few guidelines to help you along the way. These are here to maintain consistency across the lectures.

Mathematical Notation

Matrices always use square brackets. Use \begin{bmatrix} ... \end{bmatrix}

Sequences use curly brackets, such as \{ x_t \}_{t=0}^{\infty}

The use of align environments can be done using the \begin{algined} ... \end{aligned} as it is not a full math environment and works within the equation wrapping of sphinx.

“Independent and identically distributed” is abbreviated to “IID”.

The headings should not use math-environment.

Labels must be written in all small alphabetical letters. Any special character should be avoided in labels except “dash” i.e “-“

All the cite key must use the default google scholar bibtex conventions.

Math lines contained in .. math:: directives should never start with + or - as they get interpreted as markdown. This is a temporary issue with nbconvert

Emphasis and Definitions

Use bold for definitions and italic for emphasis. For example,

A closed set is a set whose complement is open.
All consumers have identical endowments.

Titles and Headings

Capitalization of all words for all titles.

Example “How it Works: Data, Variables and Names”

Adding References

Adding a Citation to a Lecture

To add a reference to the text of a QuantEcon lecture you need to use the :cite:<bibtex-label> directive.

For example

:cite:`StokeyLucas1989`, chapter 2

is rendered rendered in HTML and LaTex as:

[SLP89], chapter 2

Adding a new reference to QuantEcon

To add a new reference to the project, a bibtex entry needs to be added to lecture-source-py/source/_static/quant-econ.bib.

Sphinx and Restructured Text

Editing

The syntax of the source files is reStructuredText.

Here is a nice primer on how to write reStructuredText files.

Here is the documentation for the Jinja template syntax.

Helpful Links

Building Lectures on OS X

You will need to fetch the Liberation Mono fonts for this repository to build the LaTeX components.

brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew cask install font-liberation-sans
brew cask install font-computer-modern

Converting notebooks to RST files

Sometimes it’s convenient to write a lecture as a notebook and then convert to RST

This guide is provided by TJS and requires pandoc 2.6 or newer

(Use pandoc --version to test)

This step is necessary only if you want to strip out dollar signs from maths
- python latex_space_strip.py [myinputfile.ipynb] -o [myoutputfile.ipynb]
To convert, use
- pandoc [myfilenamenew.pynb] -f ipynb+tex_math_dollars -t rst -s -o [newfilename.rst]

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