Re: Re: Journals dying?, apparently rather slowly (was ,
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg106957] Re: [mg106915] Re: Journals dying?, apparently rather slowly (was ,
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:48:18 -0500 (EST)
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I have Adobe Acrobat Professional and my experience is that using it to convert Mathematica notebooks to PDF documents produces far superior results than the various free converters. The resulting PDF files are much smaller and the graphics and print quality are far higher. I tried the one that is built into Mathematica, I've seen the results of the one used by The Mathematica Journal, and I've seen the results of the one that comes with the Mac operating system. None of them were anywhere near as good. Maybe there is something that works as well, but I haven't seen it. For me, the free Mathematica Player is too restricted (I think it only displays Manipulate statement results, and can't use user supplied packages.) and convoluted to be useful. The Mathematica PlayerPro is along the lines of what I would like to see but I'm not going to convince many people, probably no people, to pay $200 to read one of my notebooks. It would be nice if it were free. Let's face it, the audience for a Mathematica player is much smaller than for a PDF reader. It probably wouldn't be on every computer - at least not at first. And the technical feat of being able to play an active, dynamic Mathematica notebook is much greater. WRI is also worried about hacking, but it only has to be less hackable than what Wolfram|Alpha allows one to get from Mathematica. Let's cross our fingers and see what WRI does and hope there aren't too many caveats. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ From: Peltio [mailto:peltio at twilight.zone] Nasser M. Abbasi wrote : > This is what WRI should do: make the player support all Mathematica > functions, and make arrangements with PC makers to have it in each PC and > also fill the shopping malls and the post officies with CD's that have the > player in it (like they did with AOL many years ago). in few years, the > Mathematica player will be just as widespreadly used as PDF reader is today, I am afraid it would not be enough. The reason the pdf format is so widespread is that everyone can create a pdf file without having to buy Adobe Acrobat. Every word processor let you save your work to pdf. You can even install 'pdf printer drivers' that let you save in pdf whatever you want. same story for another ubiquitous format: .doc. This is the reason many people also want a pdf reader on their machine. PDF reader that has not to be necessarily that supplied by Adobe. There are plenty of third party reader out there, many of them light and protable (i.e. do not require installation and do not clutter your hard disk). The problem (I perceive) with the Mathematica format is that: 1. It requires Mathematica (big and, for companies, expensive) to create the content. 2. It requires the Mathematica Player to read the content. And the Player itself is not very light (because it does a lot more than simply displaying files). 3. Only WRI can supply those programs. There are no third party alternatives. I do not see how .NB could become as widespread as .PDF unless there is a virtually free way to produce (static) mathematica documents without having to buy Mathematica. This does not mean that WRI has to give Mathematica away from free (even if it has gone a long way by creating the Home License). It might want to go back to the Mathematica READER and, instead of expanding it in order to PLAY .nbp file, they could allow it to WRITE .nb files. Making it a free, possibly light and portable, word processor for math and science. The offer will than see: A light and portable Mathematica Reader/Writer, to write and read static nb. Mathematica, that has the computation engine to run input cells and producing output, plus producing simulations in the .nbp format. Mathematica Player to run the simulation created with Mathematica. I believe that this apparently insane giveaway will let WRI become the makers of > the main tool of exchanging scientific and mathematical > notes between scientists, engineers and students. And since they would also be the maker of the only tool that can 'evaluate' the content of the notes, it will only do good to their sales. cheers, Peltio