Style Sheed Documentation
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg76535] Style Sheed Documentation
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 05:39:43 -0400 (EDT)
Since a new feature of Version is that documentation can be updated on-line, it would be nice to get some additional tutorial documentation for style sheets without waiting for Mathematica 6.1 or 6.01. I've a few style sheets of my own design from 5.2. I'm willing to create them fresh in 6.0 so that they will be totally compatible with 6.0 and so I can learn how to use the new style sheet system. So here are some of my questions: 1) I would like to start with the standard Default style and modify it to make a style sheet system that I will call XStyle. I want to do things like change fonts and font sizes, add some new cell types, set menu positions, add some open/close icons, change the background for the entire notebook. But first, how do I create and save the XStyle.nb style sheet, so that I can edit and develop it to the style I want? 2) I noticed that the Default style sheet has two extra levels of sections: Subsubsubsection and Subsubsubsubsection. I would like to have them and modify them. (I would like to add open/close icons.) How do I get access to them so I can modify them? 3) Suppose I want to modify the background color for the entire notebook. How do I do that? 4) Maybe Cascading Style Sheets are obvious and maybe they are not. Would it be possible to have a basic description on how they work? 5) As a designer of new style sheets, would I have to created my own cascading style sheets? Would I have to have an XStyleCore.nb and an XStyleDefault.nb? If so, how would I create them? 6) I did create a style sheet by something of a hack. I saved the private style sheet that came up under a new name and then I went to the WRI style sheets and just copied whole sections into it, and then modified them. (This is probably not the way to do it?) This seemed to work except that when I now first evaluate a cell in a notebook I get a Message window warning about an invalid value for MenuPosition and I don't know why because I made them all distinct. I had a new Title type cell and three new Text type cells and I tried to interlace their Menu positions with the title and text menu positions. Then I tried putting them all at the end with menu positions greater than 10000 and distinct - but I still get the message. What are the rules on MenuPosition? I don't see a lot of usefulness for hidden styles not on the menu. 7) When one modifies a style, such as Text, one gets just the normal Text style cell. What about the Presentation, Printing and Condensed styles? How would they be entered? 8) How would I make a new text cell type with a new name by modifying the existing Text style (keeping the original Text style?) I will probably have more questions but I hope that is a basic start. I'm very pleased that John Fultz has taken an interest in this. From past experience we can expect nothing but good results! -- David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/