Production of Dynamics Lecture Notes

The LaTeX source

The lecture notes for Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Fractals were written as a LaTeX2e document. Please refer to Lamport's LaTeX Manual and The LaTeX Companion by Goosens et al. for details on how to prepare a LaTeX document.

The source for the document consisted of a master file lecnotes.tex and an individual file for each chapter, e.g. IFS.tex for the chapter on Iterated Function Systems. In addition, there are many (almost 100) figures, which are generally external PostScript files which were created in several ways.

The LaTeX source is not being made available for distribution at this time. However, the Web version of the book is available as a gzipped tar file:

dynamics.tar.gz Archive file of lecture notes. Use shift-click to download in Netscape. Then use guzip and tar to decompress and unpack the archive.

`latex2html`

The LaTeX source was converted to a Web document by means of Nikos Drakos' fantastic PERL script latex2html. The basic reference for this program is:

LaTeX2html home page

To allow HTML links in the LaTeX document, one needs to load the html.sty package (included with latex2html). This defines various LaTeX commands such as \htmladdnormallink for including a hypertext link.

To prepare the Web document, run the LaTeX document through LaTeX and BibTeX several times (enough to generate all the proper auxiliary files: table of contents, bibliography, internal references, etc.). Then process the document with

latex2html main.tex where main.tex is the main LaTeX document. This produces a directory tree of HTML files and images. The main HTML node will be main/main.html.

Pictures

The pictures in the notes were created in various ways.

PostScript Programs

Yes, believe it or not, it is possible to learn the PostScript language and program directly in that language. In fact, because of the recursive properties of PostScript it is very easy to write elegant programs for the graphics associated with L-systems.

All PostScript files begin with %! and usually have a tag .ps. Then all the programming commands come, as well as commands for showing the results. Generally speaking, to include a PostScript picture in a document, you must convert it to an Encapsulated PostScript file (with tag .eps). For that purpose, I use a program called ps2epsi that comes as part of the ghostscript package. You say something like:

ps2epsi file.ps

and the output is a file file.epsi. The .epsi signifies a special type of EPS file that has a small bitmap of the ultimate image encoded in the prologue to the actual image. This is useful for programs that can manipulate an EPS file, such as xfig, which we will get to later.

You must study The PostScript Language Reference Manual to learn the basics of PostScript programming.

Pictures created or modified with `xfig`

The free drawing program xfig is one of the single most important reasons for using Unix rather than other OS's. It is an amazing program for creating and manipulating pictures particularly intended for TeX documents. It can load arbitrary EPS figures and then modify them with labels, arrows, etc. The labels can actually be mathematical notation encoded in TeX! It is available at major archives, such as ftp.x.org.

Plots created with MAPLE

MAPLE can produce very sophisticated graphics, saved in PostScript form. There are a few tricks to properly prepare them. You must set the graphics options to "noborder" and "portrait" to eliminate the black border and have the pictures appear in the right orientation. Then when you plot to a PostScript file, say, picture.ps, use ps2epsi to create an EPS file just enclosing the graphic.

Converting JPG or GIF files to PostScript

xfig will load JPG or GIF files as images, so that it is not strictly necessary to convert such images. However, there is a program called convert that comes with the free Imagemagick graphics package (also available at ftp.x.org). It is used in a very simple way:

convert file.jpg file.eps convert knows the type of the picture from the file tag. It recognizes virtually all the standard image types.

wrightd@math.okstate.edu

Last modified: Tue Nov 5 22:07:05 CST 1996