Scribe Notes

Everyone will participate at least once in creating a set of scribe notes for a lecture. Three scribes will be assigned at the beginning of each lecture. Over the following week, they will cooperate to produce a single set of notes, and send the results to me. After revisions, the notes will be posted on the Web for everyone's reference.

File formats

Each set of scribe notes is posted as a single Web page. You should send me scribe notes in HTML format. Here are a couple of possibilities for generating good HTML. Please email me about problems with any of these tools, or if your favorite tool is not on the list!

• A program that translates text to HTML. For example, there are programs that will automatically translate *text written between stars* into bold text, and text like this:

  - This should come out
  - as a list.
  

  into a bulleted list:

  • This should come out
  • as a list.

  For example, Textile (easy to get started, not that powerful, accessible via the Web) and AsciiDoc (more features, harder to get started, more powerful). Your favorite blogging software can probably translate text to HTML as well.

• An HTML editor program, such as FrontPage or Netscape.

• Writing the HTML by hand.

• Cleaned-up HTML from Microsoft Word. Beware! I have had a lot of trouble with Microsoft Word-generated HTML: students couldn't read the notes on some types of computers until I painstakingly fixed the HTML by hand. You have a couple choices:

  • Use a Microsoft Word HTML cleaner program to clean up the HTML before you send it to me. You will save the HTML as a Web page, submit it to the cleaner, and send me the results.
  • In Microsoft Word 2002+, save as "Web Page, Filtered". Do not "Save as Web page"!
  • In Microsoft Word 2000, download the Microsoft Office 2000 HTML Filter and install it, then export to Compact HTML.

  If the results have problems I may ask you to fix them yourself.

Please don't send me Word .doc files.

You can include images in your notes, too; just attach the relevant .gif or .jpg files along with your notes.

Style

In the past, the most successful notes have consisted mostly of text and pseudocode, with a handful of diagrams. Consider your diagrams carefully: does the picture really help? For example, this diagram would probably be just fine as text or code.

Last quarter's notes are available here. Please feel free to use them as a starting point. Of course, you should improve on those notes! And many of the lectures will change for this quarter, so the previous notes may not apply exactly. If you do use prior notes, make sure to cite them properly.