worksheets, tasks, numbering, xrefs

[Chrissy Safranski]

When I was trying to create worksheets 2 years ago, I had a bunch of trouble figuring out the "right" way to get things numbered a, b, c within an exercise, but in multiple columns.  There is an old support thread about it: https://groups.google.com/g/pretext-support/c/X5uqVfHSeIM/m/G9jQkiPLBAAJ

The main things I wanted were:

1. in a worksheet,

2. ask whether 8 matrices were in rref or not,

3. while laying them out on the page in a way that makes sense for a printed worksheet (in 2 columns),

4. so that some of the matrices can be referred to in a later exercise, and

5. my strong preference is to have them appear as a, b, c, not 1,2,3, because they are really all parts of practicing/understanding the definition of rref, not 8 separate exercises.

At that time, exercisegroup was suggested (and I did make a version using that), but recent communications have made me think that has now been disallowed in a worksheet.  Is that correct?

However, I didn't end up using that version in production anyway.  The compromise I ended up going with was that I didn't really need workspace between the rows, so I used an ol with cols=2.  

I'm pretty sure that least as recently as March and April, having an ol within an exercise (at least in a worksheet!) meant that the ol marker was automatically set to letters.  Now that behavior seems to have changed, and I have a list numbered 1. 2. 3 within exercise 3.  See here for an example with source: https://pretext.plus/projects/e9f07d74-eefa-4ed6-b3ac-fa2847af3a33/source

I have 2 main questions:

1. Was that an intentional change to list behavior (perhaps to encourage using tasks instead of lists!) or is that a bug?  

2. Is there any development that I've missed as to how I could accomplish what I want without doing something "wrong" like using a list?  The ability to have sidebyside tasks or adding a cols attribute to an exercise with tasks, for instance?

And I have a 3rd question.  The reason I noticed this behavior is because someone was asking about how to use an xref within a worksheet to get just the exercise number and task letter of another exercise in the same worksheet. I think it's reasonable to want to refer to a student's answer to 3c within exercise 4, for example.  I knew I had used this worksheet to demonstrate some of the different ways that an xref can appear (lines 264-266). But it appears that none of local, hybrid, or global will give just exercise number and task (or list!) letter.  Local only gives the letter itself and both hybrid and global give the worksheet number in addition to the exercise number.  Maybe that was always the case, and that's why I demonstrated the custom text method?  Should there exist a non-hacky way to get that?

Chrissy

[Rob Beezer]

So many questions! One answer, on fone.

Very early on, a list in an exercise was interpreted as what we now call a task, but of course we have task. This was sort of a bad idea, because maybe you had a list in an exercise that was not a bunch of things like task.

Anyway, these lists went to letters since exercise are numbered.

Put a @marker on any ordered list to get what you want. I think top-level task are lettered.

Bonus, half an answer: exercise group is banned in worksheet. Side-by-side in a worksheet can hold exercise and you have way more control. And you can lead with way more stuff than a plain ol introduction. This might help Kathy Y.

Principle: worksheets are organized around exercises, where they have superpowers. They *are* the tasks.

Rob