Masking text in lecture notes

Red Alert

I'm putting together some lecture notes. I'd like to be able to blank some worked examples, so that students will work through them in the lectures. I've found a few workarounds on the net, but none are very reliable.

Ideally I want the layout of the instructor and student copies to be identical, so just doing a straight if/then won't work. I don't want to have to work out the \vspace either.

The only other way I figured to do it would be to force a page-break before and after the example, and keep it to one page. This isn't really going to work either.

I could also open the PDF afterwards in something like Acrobat and just delete the relevant section. It does remove the ability to do quick updates and corrections on the fly.

Has anyone come up with a straightforward way to do this in LaTeX?

Tree

I suppose if you're printing them for the studnets, you could if/then the answers to be printed in white.

djpbarry

Red Alert wrote: »

I'm putting together some lecture notes. I'd like to be able to blank some worked examples, so that students will work through them in the lectures.

Change the text color to white?

Red Alert

Yeah the text colour change is attractive - I would plan on giving them out by paper, but I was hoping I could distribute them electronically if I wanted to. (This would be more with a view to next year's offering of this course.)

Clinker

The \phantom{} command might be useful here: it makes a blank box the same size as its typeset argument.

oscarBravo

Clinker wrote: »

The \phantom{} command might be useful here: it makes a blank box the same size as its typeset argument.

Nice!