canyu was a build system for generating course websites for NYU's Calculus sequence, used in Spring 2009. It was created by Matthew Leingang at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

The system took course documents written in reStructuredText (.txt) and built them into HTML pages and PDFs suitable for publishing on the NYU math department web server. It covered three courses:

For each course the source documents were:

• syllabus — course description, policies, grading breakdown, and textbook
• calendar — day-by-day schedule of topics
• homework — problem sets and practice problems
• exam info — midterm and final exam details

A set of shared snippets in docs/common/ (homework grading rubric, late-work policy) was reused across all three courses.

Everything was driven by GNU Make. Running make in docs/ would build all three courses; individual course directories could be built separately.

The pipeline for each .txt source file was:

1. docutils 0.5 (bin/rst2html.py, bin/rst2latex.py) converted reStructuredText to HTML or LaTeX.
2. xsltproc applied custom XSL stylesheets (lib/rsthtmlfix.xsl, lib/htmlscreen.xsl) to produce print and screen variants of each HTML page.
3. wkpdf (a Mac OS X command-line tool) rendered the screen HTML to PDF.
4. rsync deployed the finished files to the NYU web server at math.nyu.edu.

Configuration variables (course number, course name, term, year) were defined in lib/config.mk and substituted into every document at build time, so the same RST templates could be reused from semester to semester.

bin/           Helper executables
  bundledoc    Perl script (by Scott Pakin) that bundles all LaTeX
               dependencies into a single archive
  wkpdf        Mac OS X binary for HTML-to-PDF conversion
  remove-bad-ents.pl   Perl script to clean up HTML entities

lib/           Shared Make fragments and support files
  config.mk    Course/term configuration variables
  rst.mk       Make rules: RST → HTML and RST → LaTeX
  tex.mk       Make rules: LaTeX → PDF
  tex4ht.mk    Make rules using TeX4ht
  common.mk    Targets: build, install, dist
  docutils-0.5/ Bundled copy of Python docutils library
  *.xsl        XSLT stylesheets for HTML post-processing
  new.css      Screen stylesheet
  rst2latex.tex LaTeX preamble for PDF output

docs/          Course source documents
  121/         Calculus I
  122/         Calculus II
  123/         Calculus III
  common/      Shared policy snippets (grading rubric, late-work policy)

man/man1/      Man page for bundledoc

This project has not been maintained since 2009.