Weird self-fixing problem with cell styles
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg95391] Weird self-fixing problem with cell styles
- From: Christopher Henrich <chenrich at monmouth.com>
- Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 05:30:22 -0500 (EST)
I was working on a Mathematica notebook when I suddenly found that I could not use the different cell styles. (Section, Subsection, Tex, Input, etc.) Several thins seemed broken: 1. On the toolbar, there is a popup menu for selecting a style; it was empty - no choices. 2. The menu item Format > Style offered only one choice : "Other..." 3. The menu item Format > Screen Environment was disabled (grayed out). I blundered around trying to find an option that referred to cell styles. In desperation I changed the Style Sheet, and changed it right back again. And that fixed all the symptoms. I felt that I had been acting out an AI Koan, from that fine old (!!) book _The New Hacker's Dictionary_, p. 404: "A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. "Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly. 'You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.' "Knight turned the machine off and on. "The machine worked." I have an Apple Power PC running Mac OS X version 10.5.5; and Mathematica 8.0.1.0. My notebook and stylesheet were originally written with an older version, but I think they have been kept up to date as needed. So what happened? And am I Knight, or am I the novice? -- Christopher J. Henrich chenrich at monmouth.com http://www.mathinteract.com