Welcome to CRS4 Active-Books Library.
This is a collection of HTML documents structured either as text-books or manuals on scientific and technical subjects. Together with pre-made images and movies, the documents contain interactive examples that allow the reader to explore what is described in the text by controlling input parameters of simulations and view the result. For a similar approach to interactive documents see the work of the computer geometry group at the Minnesota Geometry center.
Our interactive books are essentially an attempt to emulate some of the features of Brown's university DynaText by using the tools available on the web.
The "technology" used to build these documents is very straightforward. We started from latex documents and converted them, using Nicos Drakos' latex2html, to html. Embedded in the documents we have control panels for the interactive examples, implemented using html forms. By firing a control panel, the reader issues a request for a simulation to our http deamon that will then return a dataset to can be displayed by yxplot (a specialized viewer) on the reader's workstation screen.