Re: LaTex on a Mac
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg18600] Re: LaTex on a Mac
- From: "P.J. Hinton" <paulh at wolfram.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 01:01:29 -0400
- Organization: "Wolfram Research, Inc."
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Jens-Peer Kuska wrote:
> I personal like TeX more to write documents even when the expression
> formating in Math 4.0 looks better than ever.
Everyone has his or her own preferences, and I respect that. However, I
would like to address some of the issues that you raise.
> The first reason is: I like to have my hands on the keyboard and I
> hate it to switch between the mous and the keyboard. It is much to
> slow, it breaks the flow of ideas .. ok I hate it
The notebook front end supports several keyboard shortcuts for performing
menu operations. Just what kinds of shortcuts are available depend on
your platform, but they are listed on menu items and in the Help Browser.
Paste these expressions into a separate cells of a notebook and evaluate
them.
Windows users:
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"OtherInformation",
"Windows Keyboard Shortcuts"
]
]
Macintosh users:
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"OtherInformation",
"Macintosh Keyboard Shortcuts"
]
]
Unix/X Window users:
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"OtherInformation",
"X Keyboard Shortcuts"
]
]
If you have a pet operation that does not have a binding, you can add one
to Mathematica's key event translation table. If you would like some
guidance on how to do this, I would be more than happy to provide you with
a worked example.
> The second reason is I'm much more handy to setup some (La)TeX macros
> than to make StyleBoxe[] + Palettes to enter the boxes fast (with a
> mouse).
With Mathematica 4, Palettes are not the only way to speed input
operations. You can add entries to the options InputAliases and
InputAutoReplacements to your notebook's style sheet. They can be made to
apply throughout the notebook by editing the option settings for the
Notebook prototype cell in the style sheet.
InputAliases allows you to map shortcuts that are activated when you hit
[Esc]<your shortcut>[Esc].
InputAutoReplacements is a bit more aggressive in that it replaces the
targeted text without any bracketing of escape keypresses.
Additional information can be found in the online help.
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"OtherInformation",
"InputAliases"
]
]
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"OtherInformation",
"InputAutoReplacements"
]
]
Information on editing a notebook's style sheet can be found here:
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"OtherInformation",
"Editing Shared or Private Style Sheets"
]
]
> The third reason is: LaTeX can better deal with meta-informations like
> table of contents, index, literatur data bases
This is something we are working on to improve through both built-in
features and add-on enhancements.
> If you become a bit handy in LaTeX you will not type formulas with
> anything else.
One can also use linear syntax notation to enter in Math formula. In many
ways it is similar to LaTeX. A short primer on this can be found in _The
Mathematica Book_ (Fourth Edition).
FrontEndExecute[
FrontEnd`HelpBrowserLookup[
"MainBook",
{"1.10.2", "2.6"}
]
]
"William B. Marks" wrote:
> Just getting started on LaTex. So I'm writing the Mathematica group
> that I know. Maybe someone has a tip on an alternative to Mathematica
> for an original language. That's because Mathematica on my PPC seems
> too buggy to rely on.
In what aspects of technical typesetting did you find Mathematica to be
"too buggy"? If you have some ideas on ways that we could improve our
system, you may want to send them to our suggestions address
<suggestions at wolfram.com>. As always, if you find instances of behavior
that you believe to be a defect, you can send examples directly to
Technical Support.
http://www.wolfram.com/services/techsupport/contact.html
http://www.wolfram.com/services/techsupport/Hints.html
--
P.J. Hinton
Mathematica Programming Group paulh at wolfram.com
Wolfram Research, Inc.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone.