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Re: Re: Any way to make help browser remember the last position?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg98742] Re: [mg98679] Re: Any way to make help browser remember the last position?
  • From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
  • Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:30:08 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <gs1nro$7h5$1@smc.vnet.net> <gs47in$7m5$1@smc.vnet.net> <200904160813.EAA17331@smc.vnet.net>

Has it ever occurred to you that it you had any Mathematica  
expressions in TraditionalForm or even in StandardForm in a pdf, you  
would not be able to copy and paste them into Mathematica and get a  
useable Mathematica expression? For the majority of Mathematica users  
this loss completely outweighs all the (supposed) advantages that you  
list below. The fact is that the way you use Mathematica is very  
different from the way most users do (well, I guess I can't prove  
that, so let's say its very different from the way anyone I know uses  
Mathematica), which is why almost all your arguments are (and should  
be) completely ignored by both WRI and other users of this forum.

Andrzej Kozlowski


On 16 Apr 2009, at 17:13, AES wrote:

>> sean_incali at yahoo.com wrote:
>>> What bugs me, no, drives me mad, is the fact that, every time I  
>>> press
>>> F1 key to invoke the help or 'documentation center,' it goes  
>>> straight
>>> to the center of the screen instead of to the right like it did v4  
>>> and
>>> 5.
>>>
>
> and article <gs47in$7m5$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
> jka <j_korthals_altes at yahoo.co.in> replies:
>
>> I am very interested in what makes people mad. The Linux version of
>> Mathematica 7.0.1.0 I use leaves the help browser in place as long as
>> you don't close it. So an easy advise for your problem would be:  
>> don't
>> close the help browser. If you want to hide using it, place an other
>> window over it.
>
>
> If the Help material (and other documentation) for Mathematica were
> written and displayed in another app and format (like, for example,
> Adobe PDF), as is the case with most other major applications, you  
> could
> jump back and forth between your active Mathematica windows and your
> currently active documentation window(s), leaving both of them
> absolutely stable and unchanged in between viewings, with a single
> keystroke, Cmd-Tab (on a Mac, anyway).
>
> Works like a charm; I do it all the time with other apps.  And,
> documentation in the form of a PDF file can be scanned, viewed,
> searched, enlarged, read, and generally used _immensely_ more
> effectively and easily in, say, Adobe Acrobat (or probably Reader,
> though I don't use that) than documentation in Mathematica's cramped  
> and
> awkward format.
>
> [Of course, one can only imagine what documentation for, say Excel,
> would be like, if MS insisted that _all_ the documentation for Excel
> also had to be _written_ only in Excel . . . ]
>
> [Did I add, that selected pages or sections of documentation in PDF  
> can
> also be printed out, if you'd prefer to have a few particularly  
> relevant
> pages of the documentation sitting on your (physical) desktop, beside
> your keyboard -- where you can just glance over at it, without  
> having to
> close or open anything on screen.]
>



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