Re: Text cell formating blues. LineBreakWithin, PageWidth, WordWrapping
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg104109] Re: Text cell formating blues. LineBreakWithin, PageWidth, WordWrapping
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:13:50 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <6597453.1255860673364.JavaMail.root@n11>
I have Adobe Acrobat Professional and when I "Print" a notebook, using the Menu -> File -> Print command and then print to the Adobe PDF printer, I have no trouble. I obtain high quality text and graphics in relatively small PDF files. But other methods of creating PDF files from Mathematica and AFAIK some built-in software on Mac produce inferior results. I don't know what the current status of these non-Acrobat-Professional methods are and perhaps others can give you equally good methods. I wouldn't mess around with LineWrapping and other options for notebooks and Text cells. The standard settings should work. There are things you can do in a style sheet to improve the looks of the notebook and PDF. Mainly I would make the font size in Text cells match the font size in Output cells. I would also leave Output cells completely unadorned, i.e., no background color and no frame lines. You could give Input cells a slight background to distinguish them. Then if the Input cells are closed up the textual discussion and output will read uniformly and smoothly, just like a paper or book. In a style sheet it is also nice to put group openers on Sections and the various subsections, but nothing else. Mathematica notebooks are the most expressive and advanced technical writing medium there is - by orders of magnitude. It is just a shame that one can't send a Mathematica notebook to anyone and expect that they could read it - just as with PDF files. Some day it will happen. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ From: Nasser M. Abbasi [mailto:nma at 12000.org] Hello V7 on windows XP. I normally use Mathematica just to do the computation/solving/verification part and then use Latex for actually writing my final homework and school report (I use Scientific workplace SW). Today I decided to give Mathematica another try to see if I can write the whole thing in one document, i.e. code and report. This way everything is in one place and no need to copy and paste stuff between Mathematica and SW. For the last hour and more I have been fighting with Mathematica to make Text cells look nice after exporting to PDF. i.e. i'd like lines to be of reasonably equal length. Mathematica break lines in places where I do not want it to, so I end up with text paragraphs that looks like the following on the screen and also in PDF (notice the extra spaces even to the left of some lines) xxxxxx xx, xxxxx xxxxxxxxx, xxxx So, this is what I tried, but I am about to give up, but I thought let me post this and may be there is simple solution that I am missing. First I turned OFF the LineBreakWithin (i.e. set it to false from automatic in the option inspector, did this for Global, Notebook and Selection). btw, why does an "X" still show up sometime the the left of an option name after I change its value? So, now my lines are very long and they are cut off when printing. I.e. they are like this xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So, I select the text cell again, and did Format->WordWrapping->Wrap at paper width, but now it looks like xxxxxxx| text here not showing xxxxxxx| ...... xxxxxxx| ..... xxxxxxx| ..... and the rest of each line (if it longer than page width) is not visible on the screen and neither in PDF. Next I went to option inspector and set "PageWidth" to paperWidth (it was infinity) I could only change this option in Global and not in notebook or Selection (the field was grayed out there). ? But this did not help either. For lines that are too long, I can see the rest of the line on the screen and have to scroll horizontally to see it. I tried many other things. Does any one know what is the best combination of options/formatting to use so that text cells would looks the best for printing? and which font to use for best results? btw, I try to not hit carriage return when I write text in a text cell. Turning off LineBreakWithin seems to be the key option to play with, but I think I made things worst. I tried also to change the cell style to ItemParagraph from text, but this did not seem to help much. I would love to use Mathematica to typeset my reports, but I still find Latex output via SW easier to work with. ps. I use Report style sheet, but even default style sheet has the same problem. I put the current notebook here that I am trying these things on, so you can see the mess I made with the text cells http://12000.org/tmp/oct_16_2009/ thanks for any hints --Nasser