How to Print Lab Materials off of Gopher

The lab manual, including the five experiments as well as introductory sections detailing policies and formats for the lab reports, not to mention appendices covering error analysis, graphing techniques, etc., is available both on the WWW (accessible via your favourite Web browser) and through gopher (which is available on all Uhura accounts). You can get it either way, but there are a few reasons why you should use the gopher method.

Why Use Gopher?

The printed quality will be much better than if you printed the manual pages from Netscape or Mosaic -- especially the pictures and equations (which were translated into GIF images at less than optimum resolution).
The lab manuals print 2 pages-to-a-page when you print them from gopher, so they take up less paper and are easier to keep track of.
There are probably other reasons, but those are the most important ones.

I Want to Use Netscape. Where is the lab manual?

Start at the Physics Department's homepage (http://www.pas.rochester.edu/). About one screen down, under a list marked "Courses", you'll see a link entitled something like "Lab Manual Pages, HTML and Gopher Home Page". Select that link. Then you'll see a list of the laboratory courses; choose the link with the name of your course.

Note: Ignore the "download" links as they're a bastardized combination of using Netscape and gopher, which will only work for you if you're good enough with computers to know what to do with a PostScript(tm) file sitting in your computer account home directory.

I Want to Use Gopher. How?

There are several steps:

Log in to your uhura account.
type: gopher phobos.nsrl.rochester.edu
and hit (return). It's important not to gopher to either "capa" or "pysics.nsrl" as you'll get lost and confused.
You should now see a gopher menu with 7 entries. Ignore the first six entirely, even if they look like they apply to you, and choose the last item (labeled "Physics_Labs/").
[Note: I didn't set this system up, I'm just trying to help you make some sense out of the silly way it's organized...]
You should now see a gopher menu with 4 entries. Choose the item that corresponds to the lab class you're in -- it'll be either "Physics_114/" or "Physics_123_143/".
You should now see a gopher menu with 7 entries. The middle five are files, and the first and last are directories (they have the trailing slash). The five files are the lab manuals for the five experiments. I'll mention how to print them in just a second.
The first item, "Introduction/", is a directory that takes you to a list of files that are the introductory and general sections of the lab manual -- policies, format of lab reports, etc. You should have all of these (although some of them you may want to read through using Netscape first as described above and decide whether you understand it well enough to not have to print it out).
The last item, "appendices/", is a directory that takes you to a list of files that cover error analysis, units, graphing, etc. You should have a printed copy of these as they'll help greatly in preparing your lab reports, and I expect you to understand what's in these sections. (If something in there confuses you, ask me.)

Okay, I found the files; but how to print them?

Well, normally on gopher you hit return on a text-file item and it displays to the screen, then you have an option to print or save or mail it to yourself or quit. These files aren't plain text but are PostScript, so they don't successfully display. Go ahead and hit return on a file you want to print anyway. You'll get an error message (like "sh: gspreview: command not found" or some such), but then it'll give you the same options to print, save, mail, etc. Hit "p" to print the file. The printout will come out in Taylor Hall, so you should go there to pick it up. (Any further clarifications about where exactly in Taylor you go and whom you talk to to get your printouts would be welcome -- since I'm not an undergrad I don't have an uhura account, so I can't try this out myself...)

That's it!

I'm Having Trouble!

Talk to me or one of the other TAs immediately. We can help, but only if there's time. And don't come twenty minutes before lab and try to convince me that you had a good reason for waiting the whole two weeks before trying the first time to print out the next lab-manual section. Try it early, so if there are problems then we can get them solved for you!