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Re: 3D Graphics in a Palette or Dialog

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg93320] Re: 3D Graphics in a Palette or Dialog
  • From: Albert Retey <awnl at gmx-topmail.de>
  • Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 06:14:57 -0500 (EST)
  • References: <ge9f52$99u$1@smc.vnet.net> <200810300659.BAA00467@smc.vnet.net> <gejivd$2i0$1@smc.vnet.net>

Hi Januk,

> Please tone down the attitude.  

Sorry if that sounded too offensive, but Murrays question was a followup
to my suggestion that gave an explicit example that used WindowMargins
_and_ suggested to consult the documentation for the 4 options that I
used. Only because of that I was wondering why he didn't look at the
suggested pages. His own reaction seems to show me that he realized that
and also understood that my post wasn't meant as offensive as you
interpreted it...

My answer might also sound somewhat more offensive than I intended
because of an unreflected feeling that many people who for whatever
reason don't like the new documentation just because of that don't even
bother to try the most simple ways to use it. And although there might
be many things that can be improved in the documentation, there are
thousands of useful pages within it.

> The documentation is not clear.
> WindowMargins is not (to me) an immediately intuitive name that
> describes what the option does.  

I just said the page for WindowMargins is reasonably clear -- once you
find it. Admittedly the relation of WindowMargins to setting the size of
a notebook/document is not easily made, but I have given an example that
uses WindowMargins to do exactly that in that previous post, so I think
the hard part could be considered done.

> In addition, the CreateDocument page
> in the help file does not reference any of its many options.  So you
> need to know what the options are in order to go look them up.  And if
> you've run Options[CreateDocument], you quickly realize that there are
> way too many options to reasonably expect that anyone new to the
> command will be able to find what they need.

Among many shortcomes, there is one big improvment in the new
documentation: it lets you search the documentation with rather
imprecise terms: If I look up 'window position' in the documentation
center, the first entry in the result list is the page for
WindowMargins. (This is meant as a tip for further searches and not as a
criticism of your current way of using the documentation)


have fun,

albert


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