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Re: Scaling JPEGs or TIFFs inside PDF slides (using Illustrator)?

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  • Subject: [mg98571] Re: [mg98467] Scaling JPEGs or TIFFs inside PDF slides (using Illustrator)?
  • From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
  • Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 03:32:59 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <19690316.1239357703079.JavaMail.root@n11>

AES,

Nobody is in a position to 'insist' that a person should stay entirely
within Mathematica! And, in fact, today the dominant mode for communication
of technical material is to go outside of it. Mathematica notebooks are not
even an acceptable mode of publication.

Nevertheless, in the aspects of learning, research, development and
communication Mathematica has and is becoming better and better. The active
and dynamic features of Mathematica are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better than
static documents, or even documents that link to animations or deployed
demonstrations.

Consider using Workbench to write an application that contains not only one
or more packages but also folders of notebooks or slideshows that are
relatively finished and that present various common topics or developed
results of your subject matter. The folders could also contain other kinds
of files - maybe a PDF paper you have written on the subject matter. You
might even have an organized directory of folders. The packages would
contain the accumulated routines and documentation that were a major result
of your efforts. There is no reason to let this active knowledge slip
through your fingers - or have it scattered in many unorganized notebooks.
If you were giving a lecture and someone asked a question outside a fixed
presentation, using the active knowledge in the application, you could often
quickly redo the presentation or even do new ones on the fly. Instead of
writing on a whiteboard you might write in a new Mathematica notebook and
obtain neat results without all the typos and sloppiness that can creep into
static hand written material.

It is much easier to bring outside static material into a Mathematica
application than to bring Mathematica into a basically static medium.

But, for the most part, this is for the future because not everybody can
read Mathematica applications as they can read PDF files.


David Park
djmpark at comcast.net
http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/  


From: AES [mailto:siegman at stanford.edu] 

My question for the PDF profis here is:  When I do this rescaling of a 
raster image within a PDF document, using Illustrator, is Illustrator 
actually building a complete new (rescaled) raster image inside the PDF 
document, and keeping it in the PDF along with the originally placed 
version?  Or does it just keep the rescaled version and discard the 
original one?  Or does it just  insert a brief command for the image to 
be rescaled "on the fly" any time the PDF is projected or printed?

Thanks for any info and assistance.
-------------

[And as an addendum, I'm copying this post to cssmm frankly to tweak 
some of the people who argue that all presentations in the future should 
and must be done directly from Mathematica notebooks and nothing else 
(and, secondarily, that _all_ of the capabilities I've mentioned above 
should and must be built into and carried out from one single, massive, 
eventually un-learnable and un-documentable Mathematica application.  

I have no objection at all to making presentations direct from a live 
Mathematica notebook in situations for example where this might be a not 
too lengthy, single-topic or one-shot discussion, maybe in a class or 
group meeting or informal situation, of material that can be covered 
from a single Mathematica notebook.  That makes total sense.

But suppose you have a collection of literally many hundreds if not 
thousands of slides and graphics, some generated by Mathematica, others 
collected from all over the place, over many years; and you're 
continually re-organizing and re-purposing and revising these (or copies 
of them), for presentations at different levels, to different audiences, 
or in different formats, on screen, in reports, in papers, in books.  

Suppose, as would be the case if you insisted on the "Mathematica 
notebook only" approach, that these materials may have come from many 
dozens of different Mathematica notebooks, assembled over a dozen plus 
years, in a half-dozen successive versions of Mathematica (so that some 
of these notebooks will not even execute any more; and those that still 
do are likely produce different results than they originally did).

So, to do this repurposing, or assembling a new presentation from a lot 
of varied existing sources, you're going to try to pull out and 
reassemble bits and pieces from these dozens of notebooks, into a new 
notebook for your upcoming presentation?  And debug that?  And then, 
every time you want to make even some small but significant change in 
one or a few slides in a many megabyte notebook, you have to re-edit and 
re-run it?  Insane!!

In the approach I'm suggesting, and using, any time I want to add a live 
or interactive demo as one part of a presentation -- and I've been 
programming interactive onscreen demos for teaching, for research, for 
professional presentations, and for my own education, using multiple 
computer tools, since the late 1980s[1] -- it's trivially easy to just 
add a link to that Mathematica demo or animation (or Flash or QuickTime 
or whatever material) from within the PDF (or PowerPoint, or Keynote, or 
whatever) presentation or online document.

Mathematica has long been a truly great (even "insanely great") tool, 
and still is.  But a lot of what it's currently doing as regards its 
overall approach, documentation, and interface, strikes me as just plain 
insane.
-----------------
[1]  For a 1991 invited presentation and article I prepared on this 
topic of this post (and which I think is still pretty good nearly two 
decades later), you can take a look at the link below.  Those of you too 
junior to recall Apple's "Knowledge Navigator" buzz-phrase, or MIT's 
"Athena Experiment", or the concept of the "3M-3K" computer, may find it 
interesting.

<http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/computer_display_tools_spie_1991.pdf>

[also at <https://www.spie.org/etop/1991/338_1.pdf>]




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