Re: Mathematica doesn't know what it's doing.
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg67181] Re: Mathematica doesn't know what it's doing.
- From: "Steve Luttrell" <steve_usenet at _removemefirst_luttrell.org.uk>
- Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 02:18:39 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <e6e2ko$1vt$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Like you I have an interest in document preparation but couldn't find any definitive source to learn how to do the more advanced things in Mathematica. I eventually concluded that I had to learn how to create stylesheets myself. I have learnt how to do this by looking at the supplied stylesheets using Format | Edit Style Sheet | Import Private Copy, and then Format | Show Expression to see exactly how their cells work. If you poke around like this then the general rules for how style sheets work gradually become clear, and you can experiment by making changes (by toggling Format | Show Expression and editing carefully) to see their effect. Remember to use Import Private Copy otherwise you will be editing the master copy of the stylesheet, which you probably don't want to do. Anyway, the key words you want to look for to control the way that cells group together are "TitleGrouping", "SectionGrouping", etc (for the Default stylesheet). You can find these by doing Format | Show Expression on the whole of a stylesheet, and then searching for the strings you are interested in. Steve Luttrell West Malvern, UK "Steven T. Hatton" <hattons at globalsymmetry.com> wrote in message news:e6e2ko$1vt$1 at smc.vnet.net... >I have come to the conclusion that part of my difficulty in getting > Mathematica to do what I want is because Mathematica doesn't know what > it's > doing. That is not to say that Mathematica is doing something wrong. I > am > speaking in the sense that Russell used when he said: "Thus [pure] > mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we > are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." > > For the most part, Mathematica is a-semantic. That is to say, it is > strongly biased toward syntax. This accounts for its strength as a > mathematics tool. To a great extent, mathematics is about manipulating > symbols with algebraic uniformity. > > In fields such as document processing, general purpose programming, > electronics, systems integration, and even differential geometry, where I > have more experience, semantics tend to dominate. > > So what exactly is it that I am having trouble with? A good example has > little to do with Mathematica, per se. It has to do with document > preparation. I think in terms of book, part, chapter, section, subsection, > theorem, definition, axiom, example, paragraph, etc. These are nested > concepts. I want to write a theorem and have it contained in a > TheoremBox. > I know that Mathematica arranges some textual units hierarchically, but it > does this indirectly through the use of GroupBoxes. > > It may well be that I could accomplish what I want through the creation of > style sheets. There are many existing style sheets available, but they > seem to lack this semantic aspect of document organization. There is a > lot > more I could say on this topic, but before I continue, I would like to > know > what others think about these matters. > > If anybody knows of a good source which really explains the art of > document > creation using Mathematica, I am very interested. > -- > http://www.mathematica-users.org/ > http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/math/bmwcs/master.html > http://www.w3.org/Math/ > http://230nsc1.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html >