Computer Sciences Dept.

CS 880 - Quantum Information Processing

Fall 2010

Scribe Guidelines

You should email the instructor a draft of your scribe notes within 24 hours of your lecture. Be sure to use the \draft command included in lectureXX.tex to let us know you intend to submit another, final version at a later time. Send both the LaTeX source and the PDF file. We will make the draft available to the class at that time via our webpage. The final version should be submitted at the latest one week later.

Take time to prepare notes that are of high quality. A student who has missed a lecture should be able to learn the material from the scribe notes alone, and the notes should be easily readable. Make sure to clarify any points of confusion in the material with the instructor before submitting the final version. The expectation is that the quality of the notes is similar to that of the text books that are used as references for this course. Your fellow students and the instructor will greatly appreciate the time you spend preparing excellent scribe notes!

Sample Files

  • lecture.tex: You should \include this in your tex document. It defines some simple environments (e.g., example, claim, theorem, exercise). It also allows you to create our standard lecture banner using the \lecture command. \lecture takes 4 arguments: {lecture number}{lecture title}{date}{scribe name}.

    To typeset complexity classes use the provided macros, e.g., \P for the class P, \NP for the class NP, etc. Take a look at the file to see the list of pre-defined classes.

  • lecture00.tex: This is a template file. It has some examples of the new environments we've defined.

  • lecture01.tex: The source of the first lecture will be available after the first day of class. You should model the layout of your file after this file, and you can use this file as a reference of Latex syntax.

Style

  • General: We suggest you don't type beyond the 80th column in your source file. Latex ignores single newlines, so manually wrap your text when necessary. This makes reading/editing your source easier.

  • Paragraph Breaks: Separate normal paragraphs by a blank line. Don't use "\\" to separate them-- let LaTeX do the formatting for you. This helps us keep a uniform look and feel to the scribe notes.

  • Intro: Start your scribe with a few lines' summary of the lecture. Do not use a section heading for this material.

  • Proofs: Notice lecture.tex includes amsthm.sty. Among other things, amsthm defines a useful proof environment we should all use.
  • Figures:
    • We suggest using xfig to generate .eps files for the figures you want to include. Prefix your your .eps files with the lecture number (i.e., 01.fig.eps).
    • If you are familiar with some other image/figure making software and know how to import its results to LaTeX documents, feel free to use it. Just submit everything needed for your document to compile, and follow the naming convention (number.name.extension).

  • LaTeX References: Make cross-reference labels of this form: \label{lectureNumber:labelType:labelName}. So, a reference to a figure of a NAND gate in the first lecture would look something like \ref{1:fig:nand}. This will help us avoid reference conflicts when we compile all the lectures together.

  • Bibliographic References: End your scribe with references to the literature.

  • Structure: Do use sections/subsections where appropriate. Use the environments defined in lecture.tex when applicable.

  • Algorithms: Typeset any algorithms using the alg.sty macro package.

  • Circuits: Typeset circuits using the Q-Circuit macro package. If your TeX distribution is recent, it is probably already installed. Otherwise, download Qcircuit.tex. For a tutorial on how to use this package, see Qtutorial.pdf (source).

  • Please don't use personalized Latex macros/environments! We'd like to keep the lectures somewhat standardized, so if you want your favorite environment or macro included, just send the TA an email with your request and we'll include it in lecture.tex. Also let us know if you have any suggested improvements to existing environments.

Latex Resources

 
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