Formatting and Style Sheet woes
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg11917] Formatting and Style Sheet woes
- From: Andrew J Fortune <mathman99@geocities.com>
- Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1998 00:33:20 -0400
Hi,
I am a Mathematica newbie, so please forgive me if the following seem
like elementary questions. I have looked through the Mathematica Book,
but the correct answers seem to elude me. They are mainly to do with
formatting and styles, and it seems that I can't come to grips with
the basic philosophy behind the formatting functionality. If you can
answer these, if possible could you please also incorporate references
to the Mathematica Book ?
The questions are as follows :
(1) I am trying to create a text cell (as per the example in section
2.10.1 of the Mathematica Book). When I type in a sentence in a new
notebook, and then hit Ctrl-Shift-E to show the expression, I get the
following :
Cell[BoxData[
RowBox["This", " ", "is", " ", "a", " ", "text", " ",
RowBox["cell", "."]]], "Input"]
But I was expecting something like the expression quoted in that section
(i.e. "Cell["This is a text cell", "Text"]).
I have tried the following :
(a) I noticed that when I dropped down the Format/Style sub-menu, that
"Input" was ticked. So I ticked the "Text" option (I tried by selecting
that row in the menu, and also by hitting Alt-7), and tried again. It
came out the same way as before, and I noticed that the style was set
back to Input. It seemed to ignore my request to change the style of
the current cell to Text.
(b) I tried the Format/Edit Style Sheet option, but I didn't know which
is the correct cell to update. So, I tried a few of them, but none of
them seemed to work. In other words, I make the changes and save
Default.nb. Then I open a new notebook, and the style persistently
stays as "Input". How can I change the style of the cell data (for the
Default style sheet) to Text ?
(2) It doesn't always seem to work the same way when I set the style to
Section. If I open up a new notebook, and straight away set the Section
style, it behaves as expected (i.e. bold with a bullet). However, if I
start typing with the default Input style (as previously discussed),
and then change to Section style, the Font size increases but it
doesnt become Bold, neither do I get the square bullet on the left of
the heading. In fact when I do a Show Expression, it tells me that it
has been formatted using BoxData. The style of the RowBox is set to
Section, but the overall Cell style is still Input.
(3) I find the Options Inspector confusing. I open it, and select the
Formatting options and then the Font options. When I click on the arrow
on the right, I expect to get a list of fonts, however I just get the
one entry "Automatic". What does this mean ?
Thanks in advance for your help,
regards,
Andrew J Fortune