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Engenda Open Source

INTRODUCTION

At CFES Congress 2007 in Montreal, the University of Manitoba Engineering Society (UMES) presented a seminar about Engineering Handbooks (Dayplanners, "Engendas", etc.). Members of the UMES Council had several years of experience with producing Engendas, and used the seminar to share this knowledge and experience with other Engineering Societies (EngSocs) from across Canada. The goal of the seminar was to help other societies start a handbook or improve the handbook that their society already produces, as UMES had found the Engenda to be a very popular and valuable service.

This website is a companion to the seminar presentation. The links below provide access to some of the knowledge, information and resources used by UMES in producing its Engenda over the past several years. We hope that other EngSocs will be able to take these resources and start or improve their existing handbooks, for the benefit of engineering students across the country.

PRESENTATION

The seminar presented at CFES Congress 2007 by Steve Woodrow, and has been translated into English and French. The presentation provides a good overview of how to start producing or improve your handbook.

EXAMPLE HANDBOOK

The 2006-2007 UMES Engenda was handed out at no cost to about 1500 Engineering students and faculty at the University of Manitoba. This electronic version of the Engenda can be used as a starting point to gather ideas for organization, theme and layout. It also serves as a great example of the principles mentioned in the Congress presentation, put into action.

EXAMPLE COVERS

As mentioned in the Congress presentation, it's important to have a good cover for your handbook. It's easy to say "don't judge a book by its cover", but if you want your members to proudly pull out their handbook every day for a whole year, it must look at least half-decent.

If you need inspiration, take a look at these low-resolution covers from the 2004-05, 2005-06 and 2006-07 UMES Engendas.

EXAMPLE LADDER

A ladder is an important tool used in initially organizing the handbook, as mentioned in the Congress presentation. It is used to organize the content on each page of the handbook from a high-level point of view.

To see how a ladder "works", download and compare the ladder for the 2006-07 handbook with a final copy of the handbook itself.

OPEN SOURCE RESOURCES

The following resources are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License, for use in your own handbook/engenda. Please note that all of these resources are provided "as-is", without any expressed or implied warranty, and cannot be supported by their authors.

MATHEMATICS/ENGINEERING FORMULAE

One popular feature of the 2006-07 UMES Engenda was the formulae located in the "Engineering Essentials" section of the handbook. Set in LaTeX, the formulae look like they were taken from a textbook. The source files (TeX and images) and PDFs of the formulae pages are available for download below.

CALENDAR CREATION SCRIPTS (for InDesign CS2)

The following scripts were developed for Adobe InDesign CS2 to automatically create the "at a glance" calendars and weekly calendars found in the 2006-07 UMES Engenda.

  • Download Scripts [7KB ZIP]
  • engenda_month_cal_single_page.js

    This script generates the "at a glance" calendars found on pages 90-115 of the 2006-07 UMES Engenda. When executed in InDesign, the script will prompt the operator for the starting year, starting month, number of months desired, and the first page on which the "at a glance" calendars are to be placed.
  • engenda_week_cal.js

    This script generates the weekly calendars found on pages 116-225 of the 2006-07 UMES Engenda. More specifically, it generates the month header on the top of each page, the date and day of week, and the mini-calendar at the bottom-right of each spread. When executed in InDesign, the script will prompt the operator for the starting year, starting month, number of months desired, and the first page on which the weekly calendars are to be placed. In addition, this script will read in a file called "important_dates.txt" and add the events noted in "important_dates.txt" to the appropriate days on the weekly calendars.

 

About the Authors

Dario Schor

Dario was the chair and editor-in-chief of the 2005-06 and 2006-07 Engenda projects, and contributed to the 2004-05 project. He developed the calendar scripts, and was the driving force behind the Engenda for the past two years. Dario is a recent graduate of computer engineering, and was Electronic Communications director on the 2006-07 UMES Council.

You can contact Dario at dario_schor@umanitoba.ca.

Steve Woodrow

Steve has been involved in the 2004-05, 2005-06, and 2006-07 Engenda projects. He created the cover for the 2006-07 handbook, and developed the LaTeX formulae section. Steve is a recent graduate of computer engineering, and was the 2006-07 Senior Stick (president) of UMES.

You can contact Steve at steve_woodrow@umanitoba.ca.

 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.