LiaScript

LiaScript is an extension to Markdown to support the creation of free and open online courses, interactive books and thus, Open Educational Resources (OER). Courses are simple text-files, that can be hosted and created freely by everyone similar to Open-Source project. This projects contains the just-in-time compiler that runs directly within your browser.

Website: https://LiaScript.github.io

Extension:

• Multimedia
• Quizzes
• Text2Speech
• Animations
• Surveys
• Interactive Tables
• ASCII-art
• Online Programming
• Integration of JavaScript
• Mixing HTML with Markdown
• Extendability due to Macros
• Internal event system
• Literal programming
• ...

Furthermore, this project is a Progressive Web App (PWA) , which means, if you open your LiaScript document at the project site at https://LiaScript.github.io/course/ , the document gets stored on your Browser like in your personal library. The Website can be installed locally and all states are also stored within your system locally. Thus, you have total access to your courses even if you are offline. And sharing a course is simply, sharing the link to the README.md file.

Docs & Impressions

To get an impression of the LiaScript capabilities see the docs at

• GitHub: https://github.com/LiaScript/docs
• LiaScript: https://LiaScript.github.io/course/?https://github.com/LiaScript/docs

or checkout the videos at:

• Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyiTe2GkW_u05HSdvUblGYg
• Elm-Europe 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_CRABsJNKA&list=PL-cYi7I913S_oRLJEpsVbSTq_OOMSXlPD&index=2

Related Projects

Editor: There are currently two plugins available for the GitHub-Editor Atom, that should help to ease the writing process of LiaScript courses.

• liascript-preview: Is a tiny previewer that, if it was toggled, updates the view on your course each time you save your document.

• liascript-snippets: If you start typing "lia" in your document you switch on a fuzzy search, that contains a lot of LiaScript help, examples, and snippets.

Additionally it is also possible to use VS-Code as an editor for creating LiaScript online courses. The packages work similar to the upper ones, but to enable the preview the Dev-Server is used for the previews in VS-Code:

• liascript-preview
• liascript-snippets
• liascript-preview-web

---

LiaScript-DevServer: If you your another editor you can also use this project to run your own LiaScript server that monitors your files and performs an update of your preview, whenever you save your files...

• Project-Sources: https://github.com/LiaScript/LiaScript-DevServer/

• or install directly from npmjs.com via:

  npm install -g @liascript/devserver

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CodiMD -> LiaMD: At the #SemesterHack we updated the free and open online editor for Markdown (CodiMD) to work with LiaScript. This can now be used to setup and host your own LiaScript online editor, and it runs also in docker.

• Project-Sources: https://github.com/liascript/codimd

• Result-presentation of the hackathon: https://semesterhack.incom.org/project/187

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LiaScript-Exporter: Currently a command-line tool to export LiaScript-courses to other formats. At the moment SCORM1.2 and SCORM2004 are supported, which allow to upload a course packed as zip, into nearly every commonly used Learning Management System (LMS). A list of supported LMS is contained within the project description. It has been tested with Moodle and OPAL. Additionally it is possible to export courses to the IMS-Cartridge format, PDF, standalone web-projects and Android APKs.

GitHub: https://github.com/LiaScript/LiaScript-Exporter/

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Localization: The project internationalization files are contained at

https://github.com/liaScript/lia-localization/locale

If you want to contribute, add a new translation file ...

Examples

Templates: Since courses can make use of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, ETC, and encapsulate functionality within Macros, these Macros can be imported by other courses. A set of importable documents is hosted at GitHub. Every document is a self-contained course describing the usage of Macro and their implementation.

GitHub: https://github.com/topics/liascript-template

Library: At the moment there is a collection of some open tutorials and complete ports of some Wikibooks (about C Programming, Lua, etc.) that are now interactive.

GitHub: https://github.com/topics/liascript-course

Further Examples:

• https://github.com/andre-dietrich/e-Learning-2019
• https://github.com/andre-dietrich/BerLearn-Talk-2019
• https://github.com/andre-dietrich/Tutorial_Regelungstechnik
• https://github.com/andre-dietrich/TensorFlowJS_tutorial
• https://github.com/andre-dietrich/elmeurope-2019
• https://github.com/SebastianZug/CsharpCourse
• https://github.com/SebastianZug/CCourse
• https://github.com/SebastianZug/CodingEventFreiberg
• https://github.com/SebastianZug/WillkommenAufLiaScript
• https://github.com/SebastianZug/Lia_Gatter

Contribute

Start writing online courses, translate your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, LMS courses, etc. into LiaScript Markdown and host them on GitHub, but Dropbox is also okay. Make your content and notes accessible and searchable on GitHub, so that it is not lost over time.

If you know some nice JS libraries or services, create a template course, that can be imported into other courses, to make them even fancier. You can host them in your own GitHub repository.

LiaScript has a set of connectors to store and retrieve data from different "Backends". At the moment there are three versions, a basic connector, a pwa connector that makes use of IndexedDB to store data, and a SCORM1.2 connector. It would be great to support a wider range of systems and LMS formats (e.g. AICC, xAPI, cMi5).

It exists an an editor branch, that is currently used to connect to Atom via the liascript-preview Plugin. It would be great, to support also other editors in the future.

Add some more localization files to: https://github.com/liaScript/lia-localization

I could not compile the project so far, that it runs on Internet explorer and other older Browsers, that are still in use. Is there is an expert on Babel and Parcel out there, who could help?

Preview

If you want to add a preview-link for the course to your site, simply add the following script to the head of your website and place the custom webcomponent preview-lia anyone in your document, with src pointing to your LiaScript course.

<html>
  <head>
    ...
    <!-- add preview-lia tag support to display all course related information -->
    <script
      type="text/javascript"
      src="https://liascript.github.io/course/preview-lia.js"
    ></script>
    ...
  </head>
  <body>
    ...
    <preview-lia
      src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liaScript/docs/master/README.md"
    ></preview-lia>
    ...
  </body>
</html>

Badges

Simply replace URL at the end of the snippet below with your desired GitHub repository (and the main README.md of your master-branch will be used) or directly point to any Markdown-file anywhere within the web.

Badges:

• course:

  

  [![LiaScript](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LiaScript/LiaScript/master/badges/course.svg)](https://LiaScript.github.io/course/?URL)

• learn more:

  

  [![LiaScript](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LiaScript/LiaScript/master/badges/learn_more.svg)](https://LiaScript.github.io/course/?URL)

Build

Use the following commands to download the LiaScript source-code and to build it locally.

git clone https://github.com/liascript/liascript

cd liascript

npm i

npm run watch  # develop in watch-mode

npm run build  # build to dist

After your first build, you can run the following commands, this will download additional elm-patches and apply them:

git submodule update --init --recursive

cd patches

make

cd .. # go back

rm -rf elm-stuff .parcel-cache # remove all cached stuff

npm run build # force an entire rebuild of the project

This will apply the following four patches:

• elm-break-dom: allows browser extensions such as screen-readers to change the nodes of the app, without crashing the app

• elm-patch/url: enables the file-protocol, which is only required when building Desktop-apps

• elm-patch/dom: enable onclick events as well as innerHTML

• Dexie: this will allow only LiaScript to access indexedDB, which increases the security, by restricting the access. This way information about user states, visited courses, etc. cannot be leaked or spied by other JavaScript modules.

Contact

Author: André Dietrich

eMail: LiaScript@web.de

Website: https://LiaScript.github.io