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Re: Re: Re: Compatibility woes

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg76656] Re: [mg76593] Re: [mg76461] Re: Compatibility woes
• From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
• Date: Fri, 25 May 2007 06:37:12 -0400 (EDT)
• Reply-to: jfultz at wolfram.com

On Thu, 24 May 2007 06:13:05 -0400 (EDT), Mark Adler wrote:
> On May 23, 2007, at 3:48 AM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
>
>> In the Options Inspector:
>> Cell Options: Cell Labels > ShowCellLabel
>>
>> Just apply this at the Notebook level (if you want to do this for
>> the entire notebook).
>>
> That's what I was referring to when I said that there were cell
> options.  I can select all of the cells in a notebook and turn off
> showing the cell label.  However when I create new cells, they don't
> have that attribute and I see the danged labels.

In the Option Inspector, set the first drop-down to Notebook instead of 
Selection, then apply the option setting.  Or you could also set it to Global, 
which will set the option for all notebooks on your system (including any you 
receive from colleagues who haven't made the setting).


> Perhaps I don't know how to "apply this at the notebook level", if
> you mean something other that applying it to all of the cells in a
> notebook.  ShowCellLabel only shows up under Cell Options.  It
> doesn't show up under Notebook Options or Global Options.
>
> In the good old days (i.e. a few weeks ago with 5.2), there was a
> Show In/Out Names in the Kernel menu that very simply turned off the
> labels for all cells in a notebook, whether the cells are existing or
> yet unborn.  That's the functionality I'm looking for.  I'm guessing
> it's out there somewhere, since my old notebooks that I gave that
> setting in 5.2 have this behavior in 6.0.  I don't know how to get
> that behavior for new notebooks in 6.0.

In principal, every item in the Option Inspector could be a menu item.  In fact, 
probably about half of the items in the menus right now directly correspond to 
an item in the Option Inspector, and almost every single item in the Preferences 
dialog corresponds to an Option Inspector item.  But the complete list of 
options for the front end is long, indeed, and trying to create an menu or 
preferences interface for absolutely everything would make it difficult to find 
the useful stuff.

So we have to make compromises.  We try to figure out what functionality users 
are going to want more commonly and make that functionality highly visible. 
Other things, which might be useful to only a slim minority of our users get
hidden.

We're always open to suggestions, but I'm afraid there will always be some 
dispute due to conflicting priorities of different users.  For this particular 
case, I would suggest that maybe we should consider putting it in the 
Preferences dialog (which would then control global behavior), but I think 
taking it out of the menus was probably justifiable.  In fact, if you set the 
option setting at the global scope, you may never need the menu item, either.

Of course, the final word is rarely written on anything.  In the soon-to-be
released incremental update to 6.0.0, one new menu item (Evaluate Notebook,
another item we had stricken between 5.2 and 6.0) and a new submenu 
(Magnification under the Window menu) were added directly due to input we 
received on this forum.


> Mark

Sincerely,
 
John Fultz
jfultz at wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.