Wed May 24 21:07:14 EDT 2006
   The following has been tested in Redhat Linux 7.2 and
Fedora Core 5, but it probably works in all Linux
environment.
   To make the lines
       \input exams/final.sty
       \input defs
usable across all your home directory, create a directory called
texinputs in your home directory, and put the file defs.tex
in this directory. In the directory texinputs, create
another directory called exams, and then move the file
final.sty into that directory. Finally, in your file
called .bash_profile, include the following lines:

TEXINPUTS=:$HOME/texinputs
TEXFORMATS=:$HOME/texinputs

export TEXINPUTS TEXFORMATS

These lines could also be included in the file .bashrc
instead, provided you have the lines

BASH_ENV=$HOME/.bashrc

export BASH_ENV

in the file .bash_profile (note that these files are
not listed by ls unless you use "ls -a").

   If you just want to typeset the file 29fin.tex without
making the above input lines to work everywhere, you will
need to change the line
       \input exams/final.sty
to
       \input final.sty
(because TeX will also search in the current directory).

   After making one of these two arrangements, you can
typeset the file 29fin.tex by typing
      tex 29fin
(the file uses AmSTeX, but the first two lines of the file
tell this to the tex program, so you do not need to
say amstex instead of tex).
   Note that the file 29fin.tex contains as its 6th line
the following

% \compactfalse

With this line commented out (as it currently is), the
examination will be typeset on two pages of letter size
paper. With this line uncommented (by deleting the
percent sign %), the examination will be spread out through
a number of legal size pages, with room for students to
write the solutions to the problems.

To spell check a TeX file, use a shell script with the
following lines

#! /bin/sh
cat "$@" | aspell -l en-us --mode=tex --list | sort -u

This works with the version of aspell in Fedora Core 5:
International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.3)
With earlier vesions of aspell, such as the one found
in Redhat Linux 7.2, the following script used to work:

#! /bin/sh
cat "$@" | aspell -l --mode=tex | sort -u