Re: Re: Conveniently Restarting Notebooks
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg51233] Re: [mg51150] Re: [mg51114] Conveniently Restarting Notebooks
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 04:19:00 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Tom, Various people have their methods of using notebooks and it's not for me to say that some person's method that works for them is wrong. Still I often see some practices that appear to me to make things more difficult rather than easier. The object is to use notebooks in a way that simplifies one's own work and facilitates communication with other people. Complicated schemes usually frustrate this purpose. When using Mathematica notebooks as a means of communication, you can't expect that readers will understand any complicated nonstandard scheme no matter how nifty it may seem to you. The question is: Do you want to get to the subject matter, or do you want to manage a complicated notebook scheme? (I like to watch opera and ballet and one of my pet peeves is excessive panning and zooming of the camera. Fred Astaire used to say that either the camera dances or he dances but not both. Do you want your discussion and calculations to do the dancing or do you want the notebook style to do the dancing?) I think that every notebook should be self contained. It may depend on packages but shouldn't depend on other notebooks. The only time I have two notebooks open at once is when I'm copying some material from one notebook to another, or when I'm changing a package notebook and testing with a regular notebook. Use only one each, at most, of the various title cells and put them at the top of the notebook. Use Sections as the main organizational method. For discussion and comments use Text cells, not the various types of Section or Title headers. I've had cases where new output cells did not overwrite the old output cells. But it is very rare and I'm not certain what the cause is. I usually just delete all the output cells and reevaluate and the problem goes away. I usually delete all output cells before I save a notebook and I think the problem may occur more often when a notebook is opened with existing output cells. Maybe other people have experience on this. I wouldn't use a lot of font colors in input cells, or a lot of color coding in notebooks. Is the color coding actually adding syntatical information or is it just decorative? Color schemes are not natural or intuitive in the sense that certain colors mean certain things - especially technical things. It's rather a burden to maintain, probably stresses the FrontEnd and parser, and will probably be lost on readers of your notebooks. It's an example of a notebook style dancing. I don't know what to say about your last problem. I must work on simple things because I never have an Input cell that extends over multiple screens. Do you actually type in a single multiple screen input cell? It sounds like it would be more managable if it could be broken into pieces. Functions of functions or something like that. David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/ From: Tom Aldenberg [mailto:Tom.Aldenberg at rivm.nl] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net Hope this is not off the point too much. I never understood why the notebook front end allows you to play in multiple windows with the same kernel, to jump around within each of them, and between them, yielding a nonlinear sequence of Ins and Outs, and why the calculation order, nor which (other) notebooks are involved in the project, is not saved at all, hence cannot be recovered. The front end is fantastic of course for scientific communication. I have still some complaints. 1. Once in a while the In-Out combinations go astray, and the corresponding Out of an In is not overwritten, but pushed down. Don't know when/why that happens. I can't get rid of it. It spreads through the whole notebook. 2. I started using mixed color font coding within identifiers, say to highlight word segments like Global or Default. After a while tiny white space gets between the colors, and the Find (Ctrl + F) utility cannot retrieve the whole words anymore. Had to stop doing that. Find needs more options, whole words, formatting, color. 3. I create input cells spreading over multiple screens, extensively using Maeder's Class mechanism. If you edit inside these inputs, unbalanced parentheses or brackets cause the text to scroll unpredictably and the cursor to jump from top to bottom to the middle and so forth. Each time you have to find back the cursor. Then you type the closing bracket and bang again. Gone. If you have to do that for hours you go completely nuts. I like the horizontal scrolling with unmatched parentheses, but would like to see the thing stabilized in the vertical direction, when you are just typing within a line. Regards, Tom Tom Aldenberg RIVM PO Box 1 NL-3720 BA Bilthoven Netherlands T: +31 30 2743137 F: +31 30 2744413 E: tom.aldenberg at rivm.nl