Page through this document by using the mouse in the vertical scrollbar on the right or by touching the spacebar to go down and the delete key to go up within the page.
Select a menu item by pointing at the underlined word or phrase and clicking the left mouse button.
You can back up to your previous page by touching the `b' key in some browsers, selecting the ``Back'' item or left-arrow from your browser's control bar, or the left cursor-control arrow on your keyboard in some text-only browsers.
This collection of user aids is ordinarily consulted through the Xmosaic reader for World Wide Web documents, running under the X Windows System at math.ufl.edu.
Some of our menu items may require readers for PostScript or TeX DVI files. On the math.ufl.edu workstations and X-terminals these documents will pop up in new windows if you are using Xmosaic or Netscape as your Web reader. With other computers or Web readers you might be unable to display some of our documents.
The Mathematics Department Computer Laboratory is located in 425 Little Hall; the telephone number there is 392-0281, extension 298.
Check the schedules below for lab hours and for mathematics classes which meet in the lab, or see the Web page version of those schedules. Please note: these schedules are not guaranteed to be as up to date as those available from the Main Menu of the window system on math.ufl.edu machines.
Send electronic mail concerning difficulties with the Mathematics Department Computer Laboratory, the network, and computers to consult@math.ufl.edu.
We have a lot of information available in the form of Emacs Info pages, which may be consulted through the Emacs editor with the command C-h i (read this as `Control-h i'), which brings up the main info menu. Web readers can consult our Info pages through the gateway listed below.
The Unix manual pages can be consulted from any shell or shell window by typing "man topic", where topic is the title of the manual page you wish to consult. The "-k" flag to the man command is useful for keyword matching in the permuted index for online manual pages, as in man -k sort, which will return every index line which matches the string "sort".
Under the X Window System you can also consult the manual pages with the xman reader -- see the "Documentation" item on the main menu (the menu which appears when you hold the righthand mouse button down while the mouse pointer is on the desktop background).
If you use the Emacs editor then you might prefer to consult manual pages within Emacs, using the command M-x man (after you touch the return key you will be prompted for a topic). Emacs makes searching and moving back and forth within a manual page particularly easy.
Send electronic mail concerning difficulties with the Mathematics Department network and computers to consult@math.ufl.edu.
The menu item below will open a form you can use for problem reports.
The aggregate wisdom of our not-very-periodic advice column is now organized in a Web-friendly format.
The following documents on Maple were written by Michael Monagan and others at the ETH, Zurich, and are found at the Maple archive in Waterloo, Ontario. Both were prepared in LaTeX and may require some nonstandard fonts.
This is the standard documentation on the GAP package for group theory (Lehrstuhl D fur Mathematik, RWTH Aachen, Germany). See also documentation and examples for optional packages in the main GAP directories. The local copy of the manual is provided below as a large DVI file of at least three megabytes. The Aachen version of the manual is formatted in HTML and may be more convenient to use, but is not a local resource.
The manual referenced below is the HTML version of the manual distributed this package for computations with groups, rings, fields, vector spaces, and other algebraic structures.
Local users may also wish to consult examples and other documentation found in the main Magma directories under /depot/magma.
The Info Pages menu item below includes a number of resources on TeX and related programs. The other items are release notes or other documents concerning TeX and its most important macro packages.
The University of Pennsylvania has a nice TeX page.
O'Reilly and Associates offers some evolving resources on TeX and fonts at jasper.ora.com.
If you want to offer documents to the World Wide Web then you probably want to learn a bit about HTML, the hypertext markup language. This is a high-level text formatting system, in the sense that formatting instructions concern document structure more than document appearance: TeX users will find it more like LaTeX than like Plain TeX, at least in philosophical terms. (TeX users will also be frustrated at the limitations of HTML, which were the result of deliberate design choices. HTML is a nearly minimal markup language, intended for portability rather than capability.)
You might want to begin by consulting a substantial list of Frequently Asked Questions on the World Wide Web or the Electronic Frontier Foundation's guide to the Net.
Subsections below consider (1) HTML, (2) providing mathematical documents over the Web, and (3) publishing issues.
These are some of the many discussions of HTML and related issues.
Hints and Kinks: You can fiddle with HTML documents and preview them without making them available on the Web: just open your file with one of our Web browsers (example - xmosaic myfile.html) and select the ``Reload'' item from the menu bar after you make changes to your file. It pays to preview a document on as many browsers as possible (at least three are available at math.ufl.edu and another, completely different web browser is used at the Science Library) before you go public.
You may find a lot of promises about future support for mathematics in some of the documentation accessible through the menu above. The future seems to be a long way off in this instance, and we may never have an easy time providing paper and Web versions of mathematical documents from a single form of source code.
Some of the options considered below have been tried at math.ufl.edu but have not gone past experimentation here. Many of them require the user of a document you provide to have an extra viewer and support material in addition to a Web browser.
The situation we usually encounter is that a preprint or handout exists in the form of TeX files and we want to distribute this content via the Web. Your options for distribution formats include those described below.
Remember that documents offered on the World Wide Web are accessible to a large and growing audience and that these documents are treated as publications for many purposes.
Therefore:
Please do not violate copyrights (for example,
if you borrow text or graphical material from another source,
look for copyright warnings and if you find such warnings
do not use these items except perhaps through links).
Please do not write things for the Web which you do not want
the whole world to read and ascribe to you.
Please do proofread and check your documents.
Some journals believe that papers made available in preprint form on the World Wide Web have been published, and therefore refuse to consider such submissions for print publication. You may wish to investigate the policies of journals to which you intend to submit before you distribute preprints on the Web.
You may also wish to assert your own copyright in some of the documents you provide on the Web, perhaps by including a notice in a comment as well as a notice in the text rendered visibly. Whether or not you claim copyright, author and users will both benefit if you date your documents clearly.
We would like to add links to some good material on copyright in the menu below. If you have suggestions, please mail them to cws@math.ufl.edu.
These are a few of the tools we use frequently. See manual pages, info pages, and files in the directory /depot/documentation for information on other useful packages.