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
- References:
- Re: Produce PDFs of Documentation notebooks?
- From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu>
- Re: Produce PDFs of Documentation notebooks?