Re: SetOptions[TableForm] doesn't seem to work?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg89294] Re: SetOptions[TableForm] doesn't seem to work?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 05:36:53 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Stanford University
- References: <g20b54$g10$1@smc.vnet.net> <g22to5$ik3$1@smc.vnet.net>
Thanks for replies from David Park and Helen Read, and I'll set to work learning Grid. But to respond in defense of TableForm, there are many occasions when one is not formatting material for printing or distribution, instead one is doing an initial analysis and just wants to get a quick one-shot picture of how some expression is going to behave, or test some function one is coding. In that case, what could be simpler, quicker, terser, and easier to remember than Table[---table contents---] // TableForm Don't need to mess with headings, 'cause I know what I'm putting in the table; don't need to make it look nice, 'cause I'm not printing it anyway; can instantly change the iterator and reevaluate if I need to see what the expression does over some wider range or narrower subrange; can see if expression blows up at end points or intermediate points, *without* losing intermediate points. And while we're on the subject of how making things better makes them worse: 1) I believe default horizontal spacing for Table used to be 2 or 3 spaces, which was enough to make most tables readable. Now it's been set to just one space, which is not. One can see some logic for making the default the minimum, I guess, but I think that was a bad design change. 2) I believe the default for TableHeadings used to be no rules under headings; now default is a rule, and it's too tightly spaced, looks ugly -- and as far as I can tell would involve deep-level messing with styles, not just options, to change this default.
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- From: Murray Eisenberg <murray@math.umass.edu>
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