Project Notes
These are just a couple of notes about how the drawings in this project were generated.
The diagrams ensconced within these pages were mainly generated using two programs.
- The great majority of the diagrams were drawn using a CAD program called IntelliCAD.
If you have ever used AutoCAD, IntelliCAD will be a very easy transition; most of the
2D drafting commands use exactly the same syntax, and IntelliCAD has much the same
functionality. It's a freeware program, but it's pretty
big (~13 M), so you might not want to sit for the download unless you have a very
fast connection. But, if getting PostScript to calculate billions of intersections
for refraction isn't included in your list of fun things to do, IntelliCAD is a great
solution.
http://www.cadopia.com/
- Anyone who has ever tried to do any significant mathematics on the web knows that
typesetting any sort of algebra is a pain. The undergrad Unix accounts give users access
to LATEX, but for those of us running Windows at home,
there's a Windows-native version that can output DVI and high quality PDF.
http://www.miktex.org/
I'm currently using the first three levels of MiKTeX 2.0. Again, it's freeware (what can
I do; I'm a student) and pretty hefty, but if you're in need of a reliable way of
putting mathematics into an electronic format, MiKTeX is your program.
The computer science department at UBC put an earlier implementation of MiKTeX on their
2000 Home Suite Home CD of computing tools. They'll likely have
the latest version of MiKTeX for their CD in subsequent years.
http://www.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca/remote/cdrom/index.html
For this collection of pages, the typeset mathematics and the diagrams
were then pasted together in Windows Paintbrush, using the time-honoured (yet cheap and dirty)
screenshot with cut and paste method.
In addition, I used small image manipulation program to scale some of the diagrams,
and produce the blurry Bach image.
http://www.irfanview.com/
The program is a pretty good image management program, and it even has some graphics
format converters.
William Chu
MATH 309
Spring, 2001
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