Instructions for Making Seat Maps for Exam Rooms

Making seating charts for your exam is somewhat involved, and requires a unix environment, gnuemacs, and a willingness to edit human-readable postscript files. At least that is what I am documenting here.

You will first need to get some files. You will need to download your course roster as a comma-separated-value (CSV) file from the registrar. You will need to have bin and elisp subdirectories of your home directory, and you need to download

• ~yourhome/elisp/startseatlist.el
• ~yourhome/elisp/makeseatlist.el
• ~yourhome/bin/rost2seatlist>

• ARC 103
• Beck Auditorium
• Hickman 101
• Hickman 138
• Hill 114
• Hill 116
• Lucy Stone
• Physics Lecture Hall
• Scott Hall 123
• Scott Hall 135
• SEC 111
• SEC 117
• SEC 118
• Wright

This is the procedure for making the maps.

• Take the roster you have downloaded, which I am calling 204B19.txt, and execute
  • rost2seatlist 204B19.txt > 204B19.list
  • emacs 204B19.list
  • <esc> X load-library startseatlist.el
  That will reformat the file.
• Then divide 204B19.list into separate files for each exam room, say 204B19.lsh and 204B19.beck.
• If you want to place the students in other than alphabetical order, rearrange the lines in the files
• For each room,
  • copy the template for that room into a postscript file, eg B19lsh.ps
  • emacs B19lsh.ps
  • replace (with <esc> %) "(Lastname) (Firstname)" with "() ()" on any seat you wish to remain unoccupied
  • save the file, and check that fgrep Lastname B19lsh.ps | wc -l and wc -l 204B19.lsh return the same number.
  • In emacs for B19lsh.ps, execute
    • ^X 4f junk
    • ^X i 204B19.lsh
    • ^X o
    • <esc>X load-library putinseat.el
    • ^X ^S
    • ^X o ^X ^S ^X ^C
    This should save B19lsh.ps, which is your map for LSH. It can be enlarged by commenting out suitable % signs at the beginning of lines.
  • Now copy B19lsh.ps into B29lsh.seatlist, open it in emacs, and <esc>X load-library makeseatlist.el . Then clean up the spacing before the seat number, and save the file. If you have changed the order, alphabetize with sort B29lsh.seatlist > B29lsh.alpha. I generally emacs again, to insert ^L every roughly 36 lines, and photocopy at 150%
  • You may use B29lsh.seatlist, possibly editted into rows, to help distribute the exams.
  All of the files you need, other than your roster, is available in this tar file. You should copy this file into a directory where you would like to keep your room templates or do this work, and
  tar xvf mapstuff.tar .
  Then you need to
  1. make sure you have subdirectorys bin and elisp of your home directory
  2. make sure ~yourhome/bin is in your path
  3. make sure ~yourhome/elisp is in the search path for load-library in emacs
  4. move the startseatlist.el and makeseatlist.el to your elisp subdirectory
  5. move rost2seatlist to your bin subdirectory, and change it to be executable. Then do a rehash.