This section is for geeks who want to know how I put this all together. It first talks about my motivations, source material, and then finally the technical part that geeks love to hear about.

Picking AsciiDoc

I had used MarkDown in the past, and was actually quite disappointed at the lack of flexibility and the limited (or at least quirky) output conversion utilities available for it. I had watched the growth of AsciiDoc as a format, and did enough research to determine that there were a LOT of converters for it, and that there was much more flexibility than in MarkDown. The particular implementation of AsciiDoc used was AsciiDoctor due to the robust community supporting it, and the really nice integration with Maven. This allowed me to use tools (Maven specifically) that I was accustomed to using as a software engineer to automate the document generation.

Organization

Given I am a software geek, I decided to organize this almost exactly like I would a software project. There is a top-level Maven pom.xml file which sets the bulk of the asciidoctor-maven-plugin configuration, and also specifies the sub-modules.

Each section (numbered 1 through 14) is an individual sub-module, and matches the various sections in the CFI PTS document. This allowed me to re-generate just a given subset of all the pages when I was working in a specific area.

There are two different variants of the document generation, one for HTML and one for PDF. The HTML output ends up in a top-level directory named site, and once completed is essentially a stand-alone website. The PDF generation goes into a top-level directory named notebook, and then a subsequent invocation of a shell script bundles all the individual lesson-specific PDF files into a single mega-PDF, with each lesson being in the right numerical order.

As is common with a software project, each sub-module has it’s own pom.xml file used to drive the generation of that specific section of the larger body of work.

section8
├── images
│   ├── LiftVectors.png
│   └── OverbankingTendency.png
├── pom.xml
├── resources
└── src
    ├── docs
    │   ├── 8-A-Straight-and-Level-Flight.ad
    │   ├── 8-B-Level-Turns.ad
    │   ├── 8-C-Straight-Climbs-and-Climbing-Turns.ad
    │   └── 8-D-Straight-Descents-and-Descending-Turns.ad
    └── main
        └── resources

The tree output above is for the section8 directory, and is typical for all the section sub-directories. As already noted, there is a pom.xml specific to this section, as well as an images directory (used to store any images related to the lessons in this section), a resources directory (used to store any other resources, like companion PDFs, related to the lessons in this section), and a src directory.

The src directory has two sub-directories, though to date the src/main directory (which is pretty standard for Maven projects) has not seen any use. All of the real document sources are down in src/docs. The orgainzation of those is pretty self-evident in that they match the "task number" for each of the tasks called out in the CFI PTS.

The way things are organized, I can recreate all the HTML with a simple invocation of the Maven command (mvn), and if I want to generate the PDF I invoke Maven with the PDF profile selected (mvn -Ppdf-profile).

Furthermore, since this is almost entirely like a traditional software project all of sources in the project directory (and their sub-directories) are stored in a Git repository on GitHub.com. With this I was able to also create a "webhook" from GitHub that, as commits are merged from task branches, the website at dfrye.org gets automatically regenerated (using Maven, of course).

Anyone wanting more details on how this is all set up, contact me. While I won’t share the sources to the lesson plans themselves (see below), I am happy to share the "infrastructure" used for this effort.

Redistribution

The license associated with the The Backseat Pilot lesson plans, one of my primary sources of information, disallows anyone from creating derived works from those lessons. While much of what is found in those lessons comes straight out of the FAA documents (I can show you the cut and paste) I have enough respect for intellectual property rights to happily honor those restrictions.

Therefore, my lessons are not available for redistribution. It is possible that if someone purchases a copy of the Backseat Pilot lesson plans that the author would not have any trouble with me giving (i.e. not selling) these derived versions, but that would need to be verified.

Notice that (a) the ASCII source to my pages aren’t available for download on this site, and that (b) a PDF version isn’t available for download either. The HTML versions won’t do you any good on your checkride, since you better not show up without a printed version, so these are here for my convenience only.