Re: fellow authors
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg92469] Re: fellow authors
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 18:29:58 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <gbulcp$l4v$1@smc.vnet.net>
Do you mean that the book will be in the form of Mathematica notebooks and not printed in static form? In that case you can do wonderful things because of all the graphical and dynamic capabilities of Mathematica. I think that the proper tool will be Wolfram Workbench - but unfortunately it is not yet in shape for this purpose. Any book will probably have enough new routines to warrant one or more packages that go with the book. Then a 'book project' would consist of the packages, one or more folders that contained all the book notebooks (perhaps with their own style sheet) and documentation. The documentation would not only link to the package function pages, but also to the set of book notebooks and the notebooks could link back to the rest of the documentation. The first page of the documentation would probably be a table of contents to the book, and also links to any package documentation. But all of this was very ragged and not basically working in the last Workbench. There is also a problem when some of the packages are loaded with a stub package using DeclarePackage statements. I think that WRI is aware of the problems and possibilities but we just have to wait and see what gets implemented. If this kind of structure were implemented in Workbench, then it could be used not only for books, but would also be convenient for college courses, research projects, consulting projects and one's own self-study of existing books or topics. One of the objectives I have for the Presentations package is to be able to write notebooks that look much more like regular textbooks or research papers. Some of the features it has are: routines to keep a set of references in whatever style you want; keeping automatically numbered key equations; writing fairly general ellipses expressions and converting them to regular Mathematica statements; formatting 'page' displays that hide the Mathematica specifications and concentrate on the subject matter; gathering multiple-page calculations, proofs and derivations into compact spaces that show the structure of the derivation and in which pages can be individually displayed or launched in separate windows; the implementation of sidebar notebooks. If you wish, you can write notebooks that show no Input/Output statements at all. How many Input/Output statements do you see in regular textbooks? For those who want to see an example of this style I have a PDF version of a notebook on a derivation of the area swept out by the focal angle in an ellipse using a very nice method presented by David Cantrell. The notebook goes all the way from the definition of an ellipse to plotting orbits around the sun and everything is done actively with Mathematica. If you wish a copy just send me an email. Of course, the PDF doesn't have the active dynamic capabilities that the notebook has. -- David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ "1s1k" <pennsylvaniajake at gmail.com> wrote in message news:gbulcp$l4v$1 at smc.vnet.net... > For those that are writing a book using Mathematica. What program are > you using for the book, Mathematica? If so how are you setting it > up? > > I am making each of my chapters a separate note book, and using the > default setting. > > I have run across author tools in a book "Mathematica Navigator" by > Keikki Ruskeepaa. He used an Author program that was an add on in > mathematica 5. What I have found out about this program in version 6, > is that it is not very good. Is there another add on for writing a > text book? > > thanks > Prof. Jake >