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Re: Which editor do you use for math articles

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg95422] Re: Which editor do you use for math articles
  • From: TL <latev at shaw.ca>
  • Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 05:31:07 -0500 (EST)
  • References: <gkppt1$dpi$1@smc.vnet.net> <200901171033.FAA14627@smc.vnet.net>

Hi Albert,

thanks for the reply.

 >I wonder what kind of fancy formatting/word processing stuff you are 
doing to see frequent crashes.

Nothing so fancy really, that's the issue. I have a graphic which only 
takes half the page width and instead of putting it in the middle of the 
page and leave white spaces on wither side I was trying to save some 
trees and put some text beside the graphic, much like any article in any 
magazine looks like. That I couldn't figure out how to achieve. In the 
process I was trying to use a 1x2 matrix as a workaround and found that 
this approach works for text/text, graphic/graphic but not text/graphic 
as my text got very poorly formatted without letting me do any further 
format edits.

the other thing was the numbered equations which had a customized style 
- modified bracketing and additional text displayed. Those I finally 
managed to work out, but I had issues with the formatting as well - for 
instance Mathematica would format some of them with the Times New Roman 
italic  font, others with the courier  regular font, sizes were a bit 
different too and resizing the window resulted in my equations being 
modified automatically by mathematica with no way to undo the changes.
Many times I was copy/pasting portions of my equations which resulted in 
mathematica crashing on me - for a moment I thought there was a problem 
with the copy paste routine but the next time it would do it without 
crashing, giving me a chance to hit save.

And finally I noticed that if you have an expression with the text style 
formatting something as simple as 2x100 is displayed properly /a small x 
is automatically inserted by mathematica/ however if you have 2 100^2 it 
is displayed as 2100^2 - no solution for that so far. And in a different 
position if the same document the equation
D=(100+100-50)(100-100+50)(-100+100+50) (100+100+50)=93750000
is displayed as
D=(10  0+100-50)(100-100+50)(-100+100+50) (100+100+50)=93750000
On the screen it looks like there are 2 extra spaces inserted. Fixing it 
doesn't really work, because after saving, closing and reopening the 
document things revert back to their initial state

I'm still working on reproducing some of the crashes but so far Im 
unable to do so

Albert Retey wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   
>> Although Mathematica 7 is a very powerful peace of software as far as 
>> the computational part goes it turns out to be quite limited and 
>> unstable when it comes to word editing and processing, despite the 
>> claims in the help that it is almost as powerful as WinWord.
>> For example it crashed multiple times on me while I was trying to setup 
>> the right fonts and sizes, as  a result I lost all my work several 
>> times, it also messed up my fonts, sizes, styles, settings for the 
>> equations, its undo is totally useless and I couldn't figure out how to 
>> format a text and a graphic in two or more columns and display them side 
>> by side in a notebook as well as how to control what goes on what page 
>> and while printing to PDF often it wouldn't print all pages, but just 
>> the first 2-3.
>>     
>
> If I don't let Notebooks grow too large, the Mathematica Frontend has
> been quite stable for me in the last years, so I wonder what kind of
> fancy formatting/word processing stuff you are doing to see frequent
> crashes... anyway, loosing work is something that should never ever
> happen. Have you looked at the stuff David Park is doing with
> Mathematica? I think if you don't try too much to force Mathematica
> Notebooks to look like printed publications but concentrate on
> presenting your content, you can achieve quite a lot (and much that is
> not possible on paper!) without hitting Mathematicas dark corners...
>
>   
>> All that said I'm wondering what program to use to write my work in, and 
>> I'm asking for advice - is WinWord any better when it comes to handling 
>> equations?
>> Any other choices?
>>     
>
> If you are after good word processing capabilities for content to be
> printed only and good handling of equations _and_ to be absolutely sure
> to not ever loose your work by software crashes again I think there is
> still no alternative to TeX/Latex and a stable basic text editor. If you
> really need that, there are WYSIWYG frontends for TeX/Latex nowadays but
> I have never found these necessary when writing scientific content.
>
>   
>> What is the best way to export Mathematica 7 equations and graphics?
>>     
>
> TeXForm[] or Export[,"TeX"] for equations, and Export[,"EPS"] or
> probably nowadays "PDF" for 2D Graphics will usually work well enough,
> only for 3D graphics there seem to be problems with the efficiency of
> the pdf export, you can find more information in the archives of this
> group...
>
> hth,
>
> albert
>
>
>   



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