A note on

Electronic Submissions

Please note that, for all electronic submissions in this course, the format used should be one that is stable and easily readable for people using software on a wide variety of operating systems. PostScript, PDF, and HTML are good candidates for this. MS Word and PowerPoint are not.

If you are using MS Word or PowerPoint and don't think you have the ability to generate PostScript or PDF formats, try this:

  1. Set up your printers to include a generic postscript printer.
  2. Choose this printer from within MS Word or PowerPoint.
  3. Choose to print to a file, rather than a printer.

Even though the output will be labeled *.prn, this will be a PostScript file (which should properly be labeled *.ps). You can then verify that you have a working PostScript file by displaying it using a PostScript viewer such as GhostView or GV, by printing it to a PostScript printer, or by converting it to PDF using a conversion program such ps2pdf or Adobe Distiller. If you convert it to PDF, you can then view it with a PDF viewer such as GV or Adobe Acrobat Reader.


One of the students in last year's class (Brent Eskridge) generously donated instructions for making PostScript and PDF versions of files under MS Windows. I have not actually tried following these instructions but they look quite reasonable. They provide much greater step by step detail on how to accomplish the tasks I briefly mentioned above. Please let me know if you have problems with them.