Re: [Fhsst-physics] Getting optic.tex to fit!

[Mark]

Hi Marcu and everyone,

Firstly, thanks for spending so much time on getting it to work. Sorry 
about the delay in responding
- been lazy because everyone's taken time off for Thanksgiving weekend 
(and given
that we are forced to not go to work I am joining in ;).

I found that the pstricks packages are quite fragile. I wasn't as 
dedicated as you and I just copied
the order they are loaded in the pst-all package in the defines file 
without every finding the reasons
behind any of the problems. If you change the order they aren't guaranteed
to work. pst-all doesn't contain all the packages we use which probably 
means they aren't tested as well.

I am not sure what the best thing to do about the package is - I don't 
think we can include our own
version in the repository because of the licence it is released under. I 
haven't given this enough thought but am open to any suggestions.
Most people can just comment optics out as you suggested but its not a 
satisfying solution. I got it working using your patch BTW.

About the chapter order - Marcu is totally right - the reason I put 
optics in at the end as we didn't have any content
for a long time so I pushed the empty chapters to the end - it just made 
things look better :). The order  I think we should
go with is (but please tell me if you agree):

- Units
- Wave phenomonology
- Sound waves etc.
- Geometrical optics
- Vectors (??)
- Forces and so on in their current order.

We still need stuff on :
- sound waves
- ultrasound
- doppler shift
- wave-particle duality etc.
- properties of matter - hooke's law, elasticity, semi-conductors etc.

The syllabus can be found at:
http://curriculum.wcape.school.za/php/circular_docs/25_ncs_physical_science.pdf

I will give this much more thought this weekend to get something set in 
stone but we certainly must move optics much further forward and also the
waves stuff.

Cheers,

Mark


address@hidden wrote:

> [Mark, this might be of interest to the other sciences/maths etc! But
> I have forgotten the `top' address list]
>
> Hi guys,
>
> Short version:
>
> You will need to install pst-optics (http://tinyurl.com/6yptp) to
> view the optics chapter. If you are not interested in the optics stuff
> then you can comment out the \input{optics} line in main.tex for the
> time being!
>
> Long version:
>
> You cannot imagine the problems I had yesterday evening and this
> morning trying to get the optics chapter to play with the already
> functioning chapters!
>
> Location of the chapter and order of loading packages are non-linearly
> coupled and I cannot find a rule to fix this without modifying files!
>
> The error is connected with the use of IFact environment which for
> some reason deletes the default values of LensSize, Rotation and
> Magnification after IFact is used or at least pst-optic cannot see
> them. So to minimise the changes to the physics section as a whole I
> have spent a very long time trying to arrive at the fix below:
>
> pst-optics.tex
>
> 102,106c102
> < address@hidden@Size{#1}}
> < address@hidden@Magnification{#1}}
> < address@hidden@Rotation{#1}}
> < 
> < \psset{xLeft=-7.5,xRight=7.5,yBottom=-3.0,yTop=3.0,LensRotation=0,LensSize=1,LensMagnification=1}
> ---
>  
>
> > \psset{xLeft=-7.5,xRight=7.5,yBottom=-3.0,yTop=3.0}
> >    
>
> It now works but is not a pretty solution. The future:
>
> Mark, is the chapter order finalised and set in stone? I know I'm late
> on board with this but optics as last is not really a logical place
> for it and the physics will be out of whack a bit too! If I get time
> I'll try and debug this optics problem better! A stationary chapter
> ordering would help me a lot though!
>
>
> Mark.
>
> P.S. I added some shortcuts to defines.tex also, \eg, \cf, \etc They
> might be of use to you all.
>
> --
> Unless otherwise noted, the statements herein reflect my 
> personal opinions and not those of any organisation with 
> which I may be affiliated.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Fhsst-physics mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fhsst-physics
>
>  


--
--
Mark Horner                                                                                                         
Jabber/AIM/Yahoo:   marknewlyn                                                               

Co-author:
http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/fhsst

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