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Re: Questions concerning printing,editing, and copy/paste

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg40266] Re: [mg40240] Questions concerning printing,editing, and copy/paste
  • From: Selwyn Hollis <selwynh at earthlink.net>
  • Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 04:32:30 -0500 (EST)
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Steve,

You're not alone. The things you're asking about are the kind of voodoo 
that most of us have experienced while reaching a beneficial working 
relationship with the beast. Mathematica does do seemingly strange and 
nonsensical things at times; however there is almost always a simple 
cause/explanation, *if* you can manage to isolate the problem 
sufficiently. (That's the hard part, and often it's not worth the 
trouble.) I've found that you just have to be persistent and use good 
trouble-shooting methods, and unfortunately the documentation doesn't 
help much with the gory details.

Re your questions/observations,

1. Remove Options-Recursive is indispensable and can often bail you out 
of a mess... but sometimes it doesn't work. Occasionally a stubborn 
option just won't go away. At this point beware; save your work, 
because if you select and try to delete the stubborn expression, you're 
likely to crash. A fall-back plan is to use Show Expression and try to 
make sense of the underlying code. Once you get fairly good at that, 
you can sometimes edit your way out of a mess.

2. I wish I knew, too.

3. Are you viewing in the PrintOut Screen Style Environment? (See the 
Format menu.)

4. The only way to get a better handle on it is to use it to do real 
work. Catch-22?

5. A book about publishing with the Mathematica front end is much 
needed. But until there is one, we have MathGroup :)

-----
Selwyn Hollis
http://www.math.armstrong.edu/faculty/hollis


On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 06:50  AM, Steve Gray wrote:

> Hello group,
>
> 	I have some questions.
>
> 	1. I found that certain cells were not editable even though
> Cell > Edit was true. Someone who knows far more than I suggested
> doing Format > Remove Options > Recursive. This worked, to my relief,
> but where was I supposed to find this obscure fix? There doesn't seem
> to be anything in the Big Book index under Cell that's relevant. (And
> many thanks to whoever suggested that.)
>
> 	2. When I do Copy/Paste, sometimes the expression (which is
> usually output from a calculation) is pasted in with the pure ASCII
> form, having lots of slashes and quotes, and sometimes it pastes in
> just like it looked when I copied it. The latter is what I want. What
> makes it vary this way and how do I always get the proper-looking
> format?
>
> 	3. I rarely print from Mathematica, but today when I printed a page of
> output that had been copied and pasted, some of the print came out a
> different size from other print, where they looked identical on the
> screen. When I changed the point size of the cells, the printout was
> unaffected. This surprised me and right now I don't know how to get
> proper printing (looking exactly like it does on the screen).
>
> 	4. Observation 1: I find the mathematical part of Mathematica much
> easier to deal with, and much more predicatble, than the parts having
> to do with formats, printing, copying/pasting, etc. Unless I get a
> better handle on this, I would never use it for final printing or
> presentation.
>
> 	5. Observation 2: I frequently can't find answers to my
> questions in the documentation. For example, the above questions seem
> to have no answers in the material I have. (I have the usual Wolfram
> material but only one small third-party book. Is there one that would
> help a lot?)
>
> 	Thank you all again for your useful answers.
>
> Steve Gray
>
>
>
>



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