As I announced at the beginning of the semester, our class will not meet next Wednesday, November 8. I will be at a workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley all week. Our next class meeting will be Wednesday, November 15.
Please take the opportunity to work on the class projects. Also, you may be interested in participating in the Internet Awareness Week taking place on campus in Rudder 301-302 all week long (November 6-10).
Discussion and exercise on communicating mathematical ideas in ways other than formal proof.
Several of you have asked if it is possible in LaTeX to flow text around included graphics. Indeed it is, as you can see by looking at an example.
There are several packages at the
Comprehensive TeX
Archive Network (CTAN) that add this
functionality to LaTeX: wrapfig.sty,
floatflt.sty, and picins.sty. To create
the example, I used picins.sty,
the package recommended by Piet van Oostrum.
Once I had the file picins.sty, it was simple to
create the example. All I did was
put the line \usepackage{graphics} in the preamble
of my LaTeX document and
insert the line
\parpic[rf]{\includegraphics{alice02s.ps}}
just before the initial paragraph. (Of course, I also had to find the picture of the rabbit somewhere.)
Your in-class computer exercise today is to
grab picins.sty and picins.txt from the
archive, and use the package to produce a reasonable facsimile of
the preface to Apollonius's
Conics, complete with an
imbedded illustration.
I am deliberately not giving you detailed instructions about how to do this. At this point in the course, it is appropriate for you to try to pull together different strands of knowledge and knit them together in a new way. However, here are a few hints (and I will be circulating around the class to troubleshoot, as usual).
plotsetup command
(rather than by saving from the plot window).
\resizebox command.
picins.sty package from reading
picins.txt. However, if you read German, you
may want to grab the more extensive documentation
picins.doc.
You might like to spruce up your home page with some personalized graphics (your photograph, for example). If you have hard copy of some graphics, you can get it into the computer by using a scanner.
There is a scanner (accessible to Texas A&M University students) in the Teague Computing Center Graphics Lab. The Graphics Lab is straight ahead of you if you enter the Teague building from the west side (the side closest to the Evans Library).
You are supposed to make an appointment to use the scanner. (Actually there are two scanners, one connected to a PC and one connected to a Mac.) Contact the Help Desk at Teague for more information.
After you scan your graphics, you can export
to a file in various graphics formats (jpg for
example). Then you can transfer the file over the network
to the computer where your home page resides. This is how I got
my
photograph into my home page.
As students at Texas A&M University, you have been allocated a certain amount of "funny money" for access to university computing resources. One of the resources you have access to is a color laser printer in the Teague Computing Center.
To use this printer, you must first enable your
xprint account by using the ACCESS
system. The ACCESS system is the same utility you
used if you set up an account on tam2000, for
example.
To enable xprint, first
navigate to the ACCESS system. Open a terminal
window and execute the command telnet portselect. You
should get a response something like
Connected to portselect.tamu.edu. Escape character is '^]'.
Now hit Return to wake up the portselector. It should respond something like
NET2:14/109 ENTER RESOURCE NAME OR [?]
Type in vtam and hit Return a couple of times. When you get prompted for a terminal type, enter vt100. You should get the ATM screen. Type in access and hit Return. Then follow the instructions.
If you used ACCESS once long ago and have forgotten
your ACCESS password, you will have to take your
student ID card to the
Network Availability Center in the Teague building
and ask to have your ACCESS password reset.
Once you get into the ACCESS system, select menu
item 1, Logon-ID (User-ID or Username) Subsystem.
Then select menu item 3, Select Computer Systems for a Logon-ID.
After you type in your logon ID, you will get a list of available
computer systems. Hit Return to display the second page of the
list. At the very bottom is XPRINT. Place an X next
to that entry and press Return to enable xprint.
The xprint system is a
campus-wide printing utility. From any networked computer with
an xprint client, you can print on any of the
university's general-access printers.
For example, if you are sitting in the CalcLab, but you are
logged onto fourier or tam2000, you can use xprint
to print files on the printer in the ACC. (Of course, you could
also transfer the files to the calclab machine and then print
them via lpr.)
Here is the basic syntax of xprint commands.
xprint -d destination_printer -b box_number filename
The -d option selects the printer. Here are some of the
options for destination_printer.
qmsacc
kodak
xerox
cxrxps
For the locations and open hours of the various campus computing centers, see the color-coded map.
When you print a file, the computing lab staff typically put the
output on the counter in the hopes that you will come pick it up.
After the print-out sits on the counter for a while, it gets put
into the box that you specified with the -b option.
For the ACC, valid box numbers are 501a-506d; for the WCCC,
901a-909d; for the TCC, 1a-17d.
For example, the command xprint -d qmsacc -b 502c
homework.ps prints to the printer in the ACC. The command
xprint -d cxrxps -b 7d -p pumpkin.ps prints a color
PostScript file on the
color PostScript printer in Teague. (That -p is a
flag confirming that the file is PostScript: xprint
is supposed to be able to figure this out automatically, but it
doesn't hurt to be sure.)
Caution: When you use xprint, your
"funny money" allocation gets charged. For ordinary printing, the
charge is pretty small (on the order of five cents a page), but
color copies are three dollars a page. So don't get carried away
with color printing, or you may use up your allocation. (You can
use ACCESS to see how much money is left in your
allocation.)
Sometimes it is desirable to print only selected pages of a LaTeX document. For example, if you have one color illustration, then you would like to print that one page on the expensive color printer, and the remaining pages on a cheaper printer. Or maybe after proofreading what you thought was the final draft, you found a typo on one page, so you want to reprint just that page.
The
dvips command has optional arguments -p
and -n that specify
which pages are processed. For example, the command dvips
-p3 -n2 filename says to start with page
number 3 and to process a number of pages equal
to 2; in other words, print pages 3-4.
There is also an option -o that lets you specify the
name of the output file. Thus, if you want to print just pages 2
and 5, you could issue the commands
dvips -p2 -n1 -o two.ps filename dvips -p5 -n1 -o five.ps filename
and then send the files two.ps and
five.ps to the printer.