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Re: Re: Produce PDFs of Documentation notebooks?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg103280] Re: [mg103266] Re: Produce PDFs of Documentation notebooks?
  • From: DrMajorBob <btreat1 at austin.rr.com>
  • Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:27:15 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <h8d56e$13s$1@smc.vnet.net> <200909112358.TAA25437@smc.vnet.net>
  • Reply-to: drmajorbob at yahoo.com

On the other hand...

1) PDFs are static, where notebooks are not. In the notebook version of  
Help, I can type my own code and evaluate it, change WRI's code and  
execute it, etc.

2) Mac OS X has "Spotlight", which allows me to search for all mentions of  
search text in file names or contents. This search omits the Applications  
directory, where WRI's documentation is stored (and a lot of other system  
directories), but that's no problem... just open the Mathematica package  
file, find the Documentation directory, and copy (not move) it to a user  
directory. In a minute or two, the full documentation becomes searchable  
in Spotlight. Searching for "Collatz" finds ten files on the disk, one of  
which I wrote myself, one I got from Ilan Vardi some time ago, and eight  
 from the Documentation directory. Searching for "Collatz" in help yields 6  
results, omitting files Collatz.m and HandsOnTour13.nb. Both omissions are  
unfortunate, since the package file immediately lets me know there IS a  
Collatz package, and the hands on tour tells me that there IS a hands on  
tour, and it leads me to example code for the Collatz problem. Once you've  
opened a notebook, you can use Mathematica's Find to locate instances of  
the text you're looking for.

3) I think Google Desktop will do a similar thing on Windows machines.

Bobby

On Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:58:04 -0500, AES <siegman at stanford.edu> wrote:

> In article <h8d56e$13s$1 at smc.vnet.net>, Tyler <hayes.tyler at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> One thing I thought was
>> to convert all of the notebooks to a PDF, then concatenate them all
>> together . . . .  e.g., for all notebooks in the subdirectories under:
>>
>> /usr/share/Mathematica/Applications/Wavelets/Documentation/English
>>
>> Open the notebook in Mathematica and save each as a PDF, effectively  
>> the same
>> name, new extension.
>
>       <Sarcasm mode on>
>
>       You mean, Wolfram doesn't do this centrally, and make the PDFs
>       downloadable, for _all_ their documentation?  (Essentially all
>       other major and minor software vendors do this.)
>
>       <Sarcasm mode off>
>
>> Does anyone have any thoughts or experience on how to do this?
>
>       As for "thoughts":
>
>       PDFs can be read online using apps designed for that purpose,
>       (e.g., Adobe Reader, Acrobat) that have convenient "readability"
>       features that make the process much more user-friendlly than
>       attempting to read Mathematica notebooks on screen.
>
>       And if you're attempting to switch back and forth between a
>       full-screen array of windows for a Mathematica project, and a
>       nearly full-screen large-type display of the PDF documentation,
>       most systems will let you do this cleanly and instantly, with a
>       single click.
>
>       PDF documents can be _searched_, quickly and thoroughly, online,
>       which often brings up info or connections that haven't been
>       fully indexed, or might be missed.
>
>       In fact, if you have Acrobat, a full set of PDF documents can be
>       batch indexed, giving you a particularly complete and fast
>       responding search capability.
>


-- 
DrMajorBob at yahoo.com


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