0. Introduction. The notion of (Haken) normal form w.r.t. a triangulation of a 3-manifold traces back to Kneser's work in the 1930's on surfaces in 3-manifolds. Haken studied it extensively in the 1960's, and showed [8] how to use it to create nite algorithms for the determination of various properties of embedded surfaces. This has since culminated, in the work of Jaco and Oertel [10], in an a...

We survey explicit coordinate descriptions for two (A and X) versions of Teichmüller and lamination spaces for open 2D surfaces, and extend them to the more general setup of surfaces with distinguished collections of points on the boundary. Main features, such as mapping class group action, Poisson and symplectic structures and others, are described in these terms. The lamination spaces are int...