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Process Improvement using Data

All the reStructuredText (RST) source files for the book with this title. The book has been actively written and updated since August 2010.

Book website (HTML and PDF)

https://learnche.org/pid

What you need to compile the HTML and/or PDF yourself

  • Clone this repository, which we call pid-book, somewhere on your computer. The location is referred to /location/of/pid-book/ in the example below.
  • Get the repository for all the figures for the book: https://github.com/kgdunn/figures. We call this figures in the text below.
  • Python, Sphinx and a working copy of LaTeX, if you wish to generate the PDF version of the book. If you are interested only in making HTML, you only need Sphinx then.
  • Around 2Gb (yes!) space for files, compiled documents and illustrations.
  • A good text editor, with syntax highlighting for RST files. I use Visual Studio Code at the moment, but many IDE environments support syntax highlighting for RST source documents.

How to compile the book yourself

  1. Clone the figures repository, preferably somewhere outside or next-to this repository.

  2. Softlink the figures repo so that it is visible as the directory of the same name, but within pid-book. You could also just move the figures repo into this one, but that is hackish.

    ln -s /location/of/figures /location/of/pid-book/figures

  3. make clean

  4. make html

  5. make latexpdf

Step 4 is a quick process to generate HTML, and is a good check if you have all the settings correct.

Step 5, to create the PDF version, can take around 5 to 10 minutes to completely compile all references, cross-references and index. You can compare your PDF to the one on the website, https://learnche.org/pid/PID.pdf, to see if you successfully managed to reproduce it.

Why would you want to compile it yourself?

Perhaps you would like to improve a section, customize the book for a course you are teaching, delete topics you don't want? Whatever the reason, you are allowed to do so. Everything provided to you is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.

But that means, I still hold the copyright on the parts I've written. Your adaptations are allowed, and in fact encouraged, but your changes must be distributed under the same, or similar, conditions as this license.

Surprise me!

Let me know what you have done, and I am always interested in feedback/comments/exercises/contributions. You can provide that feedback here please.