Adjusting styling of answers in the appendix

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Sean Fitzpatrick

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Aug 16, 2026, 5:30:39 PM (3 days ago) Aug 16
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Wearing my publisher hat: my author (Greg, not me!) isn't happy with the formatting of the answers in the back of the book in PDF. 

In particular: 
- Chapter and section title fonts are the same. He would like the chapter/section/exercises headings to decrease in size
- Actually, he would prefer that the "Exercises" heading does not appear at all. Every section has divisional exercises, so this heading is admittedly redundant

Is there an easy way to make these changes? ("easy" being relative: I don't mind adding some more xsl)

Rob Beezer

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Aug 17, 2026, 5:23:10 PM (2 days ago) Aug 17
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Dear Sean,

I am sympathetic, especially since you are caught in the middle when you put on
your publisher hat.

I tried to have the headings produced by the solution generator decrease in
prominence as you work down the tree. The problem is that #solutions is a
specialized division, so could be placed inside a #subsection, for example. Now
you are already several levels deep, and there is not a lot of room left to step
down a bit for each division - HTML runs out at h6 and LaTeX has only so much
going on from \Huge down to \tiny.

My rough attempt, that I never really liked, was replaced by uniform headings in
2021:
https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/commit/ace715dc#diff-680ee8f907f0628532384778cf5a8f167fb8ad076b4c83c3506cb54c64b0411d

Lately my assistant has been egging me on to go futher in the opposite
direction, with a general principle:

"A duplicate heading is a finding aid, not structure: style it by kind, not by
level."

The middot we are using in these headings is a small step in the direction of
styling by kind.

I did not run with these suggestions when they were suggested on July 2.

Multiple "Exercises": well that is the default #title of an #exercises division.
An authored #title would replace it. But I think it belongs where it is, even
if repetitive. Not sure if an option to #solutions could group these solutions
under a parent of the #exercises or not.

Rob
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Sean Fitzpatrick

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Aug 17, 2026, 6:54:48 PM (2 days ago) Aug 17
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A lot of this comes down to "Greg wants it to look like it used to on LaTeX". In this case I'm not convinced many readers pay close attention to the aesthetics of the answers in the back... 

It looks nontrivial to mess with this but I'll take a look. 

For what it's worth, this is what it used to look like: 






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