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The LENO Help and About page

The LENO system is made to support the authoring of lecture notes, organized in a number of chapters (or lectures). The top-level page refers to each lecture in the material. Each lecture, in turn, refers to a number of pages.

As an important characteristics of LENO, each page can be shown in at least three, and depending on the material, possibly four different views:

  • A slide view
  • An annotated slide view
  • An aggregated lecture view
  • A thematic view

In slide view the primary information on a page is shown using a large font, hereby making it attractive to present the information from a browser via a projector in an auditorium.

In the annotated slide view the primary information is shown with a number of annotations, which are associated with the individual constituents of a slide page. As in slide view, a single page is shown in isolation from all other pages, but links to the previous and the next page exists.

An aggregated lecture view shows the primary slide information and the annotations of all pages in a lecture. Thus, in this view, the pages of a lecture are all aggregated into a single 'lecture page'. The information contents of this view is the same as the sum of the information of the all annotated slides in a single lecture.

The thematic view typically shows most slide elements, including the annotations, with additional interleavning text. Typically, but not necessarily, a theme correspond to a section of slides. In the theme view of a material, elements such as programs, images, tables, and exercises are numbered hierarchically. Themes are not always present in a LENO-based material. The thematic view of the material may be available as PDF files via the 'printer icon'. It takes extra efforts by the autor to create a thematic view of the material. Use the yellow T icon to navigate to thematic expositions, if they are available.

In addition, LENO supports generation of an automatically progressing slide show with the teacher's speaker sound. For this to work, the author needs to record the speaker sound and prepare the sequencing and timing of the individual pages in the show. An automatically progressing slide show with speaker sound is started from the lecture overview page, with one of the small speaker icons or from one of the textually anchored links just above the note page table. The slide show brings you through selected slide pages, programs, and image series. Notice that some of the slide pages my be visited more than once (such as before and after an external program page or image series - with different speaker sounds). The speaker sound can come from wav of mp3 files. If the material is located on a web server, the sound is streamed to your browser, and currently it relies on RealPlayer from http://www.real.com . For setup see for instance Aalborg University's video pages .

The navigation icons used in LENO are presented in the table below:

IconKeyboard shortcutExplanation
uGo up one strutural level towards the top-level page
pGo to the previous page. The icon is also used to navigate from one lectures to the previous lecture.
n, CRGo to the next page. The icon is also used to navigate from one lectures to the next lecture and other similar purposes.This navigation can also be activated by a double click on the background (Internet Explorer only).
no shortcutGo to a download page, which allows access to a zip file with all the files making up the set set of lectures.
no shortcutGo to a page with an alphabetic index of the lecture notes covering all lectures.
no shortcutGo to this help page
no shortcutGo to the page designated as the home page of these lecture notes.
no shortcutGo to particular page in the aggregated lecture view
tGo to the annotated slide view from the slide view.
tGo to the slide view from the annotated slide view.
no shortcutGo to the readers comments on this page. Also allows you to post your own comments. This is a link to an annotation server which is external to LENO.
no shortcutAs above - but there is at least one existing comment to this page.
no shortcutIf the current page is within a frame set, then break out from it. If not, nothing happens.
A number in the interval 1..9Go to a source program
A number in the interval 1..9Go to an exercise
A number in the interval 1..9Go to an image series
no shortcutGo to an elucidator, which explains a program
no shortcutGo to a sidetrack, which is supposed to explain some special topic of the material. The side track is presented in a frameset of its own, which at any time allows you to go back on the main track very easily.
xSymbolizes an automatic slide show, possibly with speaker sound. By clicking the symbol the automatic slide show stops.
xSymbolizes a stopped slide show. By clicking this symbol the automatic slide with possible speaker sound show starts.
nGo to the next page in an automatically progressing slide show (with speaker sound). Accross a number of pages, these arrow symbols trace the 'dynamic chain' of a slide show as opposed to the yellow arrow symbols that navigate the static page structures.
yPlays the speaker sound of a single slide page. You can navigate freely while listening to the speaker sound. If you start a new speaker sound, the already playing sound stops. If, however, you start an automatically progressing slide show with speaker sound, you will experience 'double sound'
no shortcutA symbol shown in a lecture index which links to a particular place in an automatic slide show.
rGo to the table of contents of a trail
qGo to the previous slides in a trail
no shortcutGo to the current slide in a trail
wGo to the next slide in a trail
no shortcutGo back on the main track from a sidetrack
vGo to the corresponding, comprehensive textbook version of the material. This is also known as the thematic view.
no shortcutGo to the Lecture overview from a theme overview
no shortcutGo to a page which gives access to PDF files

The four red icons are used in the LENO trail facility. Using a LENO trail it is possible to define a sequence of slides from selected slides in a number of sections. The trail determines the selection and the sequence of the slides. This is useful if you want to present a subset of your slides for some purpose, and if you do not want to deal with multiple copies (which is usually a bad solution). The LENO trail facilities is realized via use of HTML frames. The red icons from above are all shown in a frame of its own (in the leftmost margin), the trail navigation frame. Notice that you can navigate freely in the slide trail while maintaining the context of the trail.

The keyboard shortcuts work in Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6 (from Microsoft), and in Mozilla and Netscape 6.

The collection of HTML WWW pages, which constitute a set of lecture notes, are generated from an XML-in-LAML source file, written in the programming language Scheme. Scheme is a language in the Lisp family of languages. The LENO surface syntax is generated from an XML Document Type Definition (DTD), and as such LENO is tightly connected to XML. The LENO Reference Manual describes the elements and attributes of the LENO XML language. The underlying system, called LAML (Lisp Abstracted Markup Language) is described in further detail in the LAML home page .

If you consider to make a LENO material yourself we will recommend that you start reading the LENO tutorial , which is part of the LAML Tutorial .

Kurt Nørmark
Aalborg University
normark@cs.auc.dk
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~normark/