You can submit any of the following:
- a scan of handwritten work (best format PDF, maybe could also be JPG).
Note that even cell phones tend to have very large camera resolutions nowadays and the
filesizes can be too big for my online submission mechanism. An App I have found useful
is CamScanner; you can photograph multiple pages and generate a single PDF file of reasonable size.
- typewritten plain text using LaTeX conventions for mathematics (explained below)
- formatted mathematics in PDF, or DOC/DOCX
But always be sure that the file name you use for the submission has
an extension correctly reflecting the file type (.pdf, .txt, .doc,
.docx, etc.).
I personally find plain text and PDF to be the most convenient formats
to view, but I can also manage with .doc or .docx, and some TAs may
favor doc/docx for ease of placing electronic markup in the document.
(If the TA does not insert markup, it also generally works pretty well
to just make side comments in Sakai.) Occasionally, students also
have found ExCEL spreadsheets convenient for submitting something in
tabular format. Other more obscure formats should be converted into
one of the formats already mentioned.
Here is what I suggest for how to type mathematics in plain text
(based on the way that math is done in LaTeX). I will give a few
rules, and then some examples.
- When typing math and regular text, the math is surrounded by a pair,
of $ signs.
- Any time you need to group something from a formatting standpoint
use curly braces. You can continue to use parentheses and brackets to
group things for mathematical precedence.
- Use _ for a subscript and ^ for a superscript.
- You can happily type +, -, and / for mathematical operations, but
don't use x for multiplication, because it looks like a variable name;
instead use \cdot (standing for centered dot) for multiplication.
To make the points so far concrete, you might say something like the
Pythagorean theorem is that $a^2+b^2=c^2$ or that a handy rule about
exponentiation is that $b^x \cdot b^y$ is equal to $b^{x+y}$. (In
LaTeX notation, we use that last expression rather than $b^(x+y)$,
because the carat should be viewed as something that makes a
superscript out of the the next symbol or the next chunk in curly
braces. Superscripts can be used for things besides exponentiation,
and the carat is not just an exponentiation operator.)
Just like \cdot is the LaTeX notation for a centered dot, anything
that begins with a backslash is some sort of a command name, so you
can use or make up other sensible things, for example \sum for the
capital Sigma that introduces a summation, \prod for a product, \alpha
and so on for Greek letters, \forall and \exists for quantifiers in
logical expressions, \vee and \wedge for the OR and AND symbols,
\implies for the logical implication symbol, \cup and \cap for set
union and intersection. I think that's most of what you might need,
except that a couple commands with arguments could be useful, for
example, "\overbar{x}" to put a bar over "x".