This is, as much as anything, a chance for you to reflect a bit on your course of study, your experiences in computing, and what kinds of questions or areas of computing might interest you in terms of research.
First, if you need to, you can download a PDF of the document I handed out on Friday (if you lost the actual piece of paper). However, you will be more interested in the LaTeX starter file for this survey.
A Quick Intro to LaTeX
This is a really quick intro, for the two of you who are less familiar with LaTeX.
Think of it this way: LaTeX is like HTML. A LaTeX document takes plain text, and with "markup", allows you to specify how the document should be rendered. In HTML, this is through "tags". In LaTeX, it is through... "markup". (I'm not sure at the moment if there is a technical term for it.)
- Download the starter file.
- Rename it to something sensible; I might call mine mjadud_survey.tex
- Now, open the document in a plain-text editor. You might use Emacs, or VI, or perhaps even GEdit (or some other text editor under Linux). Answer the questions. Please be thorough—it will help you in your thinking about research, and help me in thinking about how best to support you.
- Then, at some point that you want to see how things look, you can convert that pile of text into a PDF. On the command line, you'll want to do the following:
pdflatex mjadud_survey.tex(Of course, you probably named yours something else.) pdflatex takes a LaTeX file and turns it into a PDF. Very handy. If you messed up your LaTeX, it will throw an error, and stop. An "x" or a CTRL-C, CTRL-D will get you out.
- Once you have a PDF, you can open it in Evince to review it, and print from there as necessary.
Resources
There are many resources for LaTeX. To point to just a few:
- The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX (PDF link)
- A WikiBook on LaTeX
- A Guide to LaTeX
- Getting Started with LaTeX
- Google
There are many resources around the web about LaTeX, and you're welcome to use the Junior Seminar mailing list to ask your questions.
Why do we use it?
- Most any journal or conference in Computer Science will expect you to submit a PDF, and they will provide style files for LaTeX. The expectation is that you are using LaTeX to author your work.
- By writing in LaTeX, your documents are stored in plain text. This means that they will always be readable. Word 95 documents are, sometimes, difficult to open (or lost forever). ASCII text has been around for a long time.
- LaTeX documents play nicely with version control systems.
- LaTeX documents are platform agnostic.
- LaTeX documents are small and easy to share.
The list goes on and on. I think you get the picture.
