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Re: Lists: Row Vectors vs. Column Vectors. (feels like such a silly

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  • Subject: [mg110301] Re: Lists: Row Vectors vs. Column Vectors. (feels like such a silly
  • From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
  • Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2010 05:32:59 -0400 (EDT)

On 6/11/10 at 2:10 AM, rgorka at gmail.com (telefunkenvf14) wrote:

>Bill:

>I seem to recall reading (a few months ago) that you always
>displayed your output in traditional form---and I actually took your
>advice and tried it for a while. (Can't remember exactly why I
>switched back to StandardForm i/o only... probably something to do
>with copy/paste ambiguities.)

>Anyways, I suppose I would have stuck with it if there were a way to
>make *just* the matrix-related output display TraditionalForm. Man,
>I'm picky! :)  (and I can't imagine that such a tweak would be
>easy.)

I probably should have noted while I have my default output set
to TraditionalForm, I have the input set to StandardForm. Since
the most frequent copy/past operations I do are from one input
cell to another, this arrangement avoids copy/paste issues for
the most part. Occasionally, I find I want to copy/paste a
numeric value from an output cell to an input cell. At those
times, I see an additional step asking whether the pasted value
should be interpreted literally or not. The end result is one
extra step in the copy/paste operation. I do this so seldom,
I've never considered it an issue.

The only other issue I see with my arrangement is some outputs
have specialized functions I am not familiar with. Consequently,
the TraditionalForm isn't very useful to me. But this is easily
fixed by either using FullForm on the result or selecting the
output cell and changing it to either InputForm or StandardForm.
This gives me something I can easily lookup in the
DocumentationCenter or elsewhere to get more information on a
particular specialized function. Again, this doesn't happen all
that often. So, the additional steps haven't seemed onerous to me.

Keeping the inputs formatted as StandardForm solves one other
problem. That is it eliminates the need to figure out what key
strokes are needed to enter the particular symbol used in
TraditionalForm or needing to find an appropriate palette.



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