A Short Tutorial on DrawPlus

I posted this to the LinkedIn group late last week, and I thought I would also extend the tutorial over here. We often recommend the program DrawPlus for creating diagrams. It's intuitive, it's free, and it's easy to download.

If you'd like to give it a try, just go to the site and download the free version.

Then watch a short tutorial on getting started and saving images so you can paste them in your solutions.

Happy authoring!

Templates for Solutions Using Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, TI

If you're working on a textbook where you are using any of the following software programs to write your solutions, then you are in luck! We're providing you with templates for exactly how to write these problems. The templates include solutions to problems using:

Maple
Mathematica
MATLAB
TI Graphing Calculator

Download the files by clicking the link above. Then solve away!

Tips on Diagrams and Graphing

Too bad all of your graphs
can't be this simple...

Another round of helpful tips for all of you authors working on books that contain a lot of diagrams, tables, etc. These can be a pain, we know! To help out, we've created a list of (1) rules, (2) recommended software, and (3) templates for referring to diagrams/figures/tables

General rules to follow for how to deal with diagrams and graphing:

• For all tables over 15 rows, you need only recreate the first 15 rows or simply describe the table. Otherwise, just recreate it, making sure it fits within the page margins. Center it.
• If a diagram is far too complicated to re-create AND you will not be needing to manipulate it to solve the problem, simply refer to the diagram. There are very specific ways to do this. More on that below.
• Center and make sure all diagrams are "in line with text". 

Top recommended software for creating diagrams and graphs:

• DrawPlus
• Geogebra (for geometry)
• Avogadro (for 3D chem diagramming)
• CorelDraw (chem diagramming)
• Maxima (for 2D and 3D graphs)
• Aepryus (graphing)
• Skitch (for marking up screenshots). This program is a part of Evernote, which I also highly recommend for a variety of purposes.

How do you refer to a diagram, figure, or table?

The easiest way to refer to a diagram is to describe it briefly. Do NOT mention page numbers, figure numbers, problem numbers, chapter numbers, as these things can change from one edition to the next. Instead, saying something like:

For Diagrams:

"In this problem, we are given a diagram of a box with a length of 10cm, a width of 5 cm, and a height of 4 cm. We are asked to calculate the area of this box, so first we must use the formula for calculating area..."

For Tables:

"To solve this problem, refer to the table that lists the monthly spending of Company C in USD from January 2010 to February 2012."