Re: "Anti-Comments"?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg69193] Re: "Anti-Comments"?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 06:41:35 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Stanford University
- References: <ed68rf$jg7$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In article <ed68rf$jg7$1 at smc.vnet.net>, "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net> wrote: > I want to respond to this but I'm not quite certain of the best response! So > this will be more in the line of musing. What I > think you are really getting after is a tighter integration of textual > material and active definitions and commands. Yes, exactly right. And more broadly, rather than doing calculations and preparing graphs in Mathematica, then copying results from it over into a separate word processing document, in many (in fact, most) cases I'd like to have just one master Mathematica notebook for some project or problem or topic, which would contain pretty literally **everything**, from initial analyses through numerical calculations and graphing, and on to transmitting results as reports and even slide presentations to co-workers, colleagues, sponsors, and other audiences. Such a notebook, with all cells fully open, would contain and display pretty much *everything* I did on the problem. A lot of useful project-specific utility modules for calculation and display would like be defined at the start of the notebook, then hidden from view (cells closed) so I don't have to scroll over them as I do further work, or other readers don't have to wade down through them. [This could of course be done with Packages -- but I want everything *right in the notebook*, rather than creating, re-creating, and navigating among other files every time I decide to modify a module a little bit.] As final forms for equations or display modules were developed there might be test cases that took a long time to run. Once these tests came out OK, the test results could be deleted but the test routines hidden, so that they would be there if I needed to go back to them. Included at the start of some sections might be initial analyses and algebraic messing around that I did to get formulas and equations into forms that I liked; these would be hidden once completed, but still there if I needed them. As the project develops I'm very likely to be inserting new and more or less free-standing sections in the notebook which are pretty much independent of definitions and calculations in earlier sections. I'd like to be able to disable those earlier sections so I can just use cmd-A, Enter to run the emerging section repeatedly as I edit it, with no selections or mouse clicks. Some "final" results (graphs with many points, or long iterative calculations) might take a long time to run. Once they ran successfully, I'd freeze the result and disable the calculation routine -- unless I needed to run it again, perhaps for new variable values. Depending on the intended audience I will likely want to print the notebook (or maybe just a few sections of it) to PDF, with varying levels of content included and suppressed -- e.g., headings, text, major equations, figures and tables for a report, but just figures and tables (one per page) for presentation slides. Some of the figures will get Exported to PostScript or PDF; TeX or LaTeX or Word will get fired up; and I'll start Copy and Pasting or re-keyboarding only if the target audience is a journal ms or technical meeting submission that requires those formats and is to cover only selected portions of the material in the notebook. And in all of this, I'd like the notebook to stay as "readable" -- as "ordinary notebook looking" in its structure as possible -- but also have the variations in displayed or active sections be controlled by flags set in the opening few cells of the notebook. These general considerations have been the source of a lot of my questions to this group over time.