Re: How does MathReader work?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg43359] Re: [mg43337] How does MathReader work?
- From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 07:13:34 -0400 (EDT)
- Reply-to: jfultz at wolfram.com
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
MathReader is purely a notebook reader (with support for a few minor things like Find and Print). It is unable to change or evaluate the contents of a notebook. Your idea of allowing Mathematica to evaluate contents in an existing notebook is interesting. I don't think, though, that it's very practical in the short term. One of the big advantages to MathReader is that it is a much smaller download than Mathematica (11 megabytes vs. 85 megabytes), which makes it accessible to a larger set of people. The reason it's so much smaller is that we omit the entire kernel and all of its support files, along with much of the documentation. I don't agree that, in the modern world, notebooks with graphics and output are so generally unwieldy as to make them inappropriate to transmit to others; although, I can certainly understand how a very graphics-intensive notebook could be a problem. There are possibilities (none fantastic) for reducing the size of graphics. You could, for example, convert the graphics to bitmap, which throws away all of the PostScript data and is good for complex graphics, but you'd lose resolution-independence for printing, export, or copy/paste. Any way, things change, and perhaps some day we'll get to the point where a ~40 megabyte download (my guess for how much kernel plus FE minus documentation might take up) isn't such a big deal, and we might decide in such a world that a MathReader closer to what you desire is reasonable. I can't make any predictions for if or when it might happen, but I can hint that it's not an implausible direction for a future MathReader. Sincerely, John Fultz jfultz at wolfram.com User Interface Group Wolfram Research, Inc. On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 04:10:48 -0400 (EDT), David Park wrote: >Dear MathGroup and WRI, > >I am interesting in knowing more precisely what can be done with >MathReader. >I suspect that it doesn't do what I really want but the documentation is a >bit vague. > >This is what I would like MathReader to do: > >1) The MathReader user should be able to open a Mathematica notebook with >all output and graphics deleted and then evaluate the notebook and >generate >the graphics and animation. > >2) The MathReader user should be able to install third party packages and >applications, which could be utilized by the notebooks he reads. > >3) But the MathReader user could not edit or change any notebook. He could >not type in his own statements. He would be strictly limited to evaluating >notebooks created by full Mathematica owners. > >If MathReader cannot evaluate a notebook, then all the graphics, animation >and traditional form output must be embedded and this means that for all >practical purposes the notebooks are too large for routine transmission. >In >that case MathReader can only be used for trivial purposes. > >David Park >djmp at earthlink.net >http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/