Re: How to write reports and books in Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg109739] Re: How to write reports and books in Mathematica
- From: Murray Eisenberg <murray at math.umass.edu>
- Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 05:35:54 -0400 (EDT)
The twocolumn function in Presentations is very handy for a couple of
quick two-column insertions in a notebook. But for each such insertion
it requires typing and evaluating an Input cell of a form such as:
twocolumn[
comment["blahblah...."],
command[expr]
]
This is far better than nothing. But it's no substitute for a
full-fledged stylesheet that includes a two-column cell style such as
were used -- or simulated in a separate layout program? -- for the
printed "The Mathematica Book" from days of yore.
This is not any shortcoming of Presentations. It's a deficiency of
Mathematica. Perhaps another instance of WRI's deliberate denigration
of print (or print-like) media. Or perhaps an inherent limitation of
the Mathematica front end design?
On 5/13/2010 7:25 AM, David Park wrote:
> The Presentations package does have such a functionality. It has formatting
> commands for laying out material on the page. You can see some of this in
> the Roger Williams video that was posted earlier in this thread.
>
> This is all designed for presenting mathematical material to readers and
> suppressing strings of input/output cells or boiler-plate specifications.
> This may not be exactly what you are thinking of. It is not a method of
> having side-by-side independent cells. You can have TextCell or
> ExpressionCell inside a Mathematica expression, Row for example, but they
> seem to always get evaluated. There doesn't seem to be a way to generate
> independent cells within an expression, that can be independently evaluated.
>
> But, if you want to present defined calculations to a reader, Presentations
> has twocolumn, comment and command statements that allow you to layout a two
> column display with comments (or even some active statements) on one side
> and "commands" on the other side. The commands show the result of an
> evaluation and in a tooltip (if you want that) that shows the unevaluated
> input statements that produced the output. There are also commands for
> setting up buttons either as a cell, or in Inline text cells to generate
> displays. The buttons are designed to either generate a display in the next
> cell or as a free standing window. There are also constructions to generate
> a structure of buttons, which can be clicked through to go through the steps
> of a longer derivation or proof. The reader can again generate some of the
> "page" steps in separate windows so that various sections of a derivation
> can be compared side by side.
>
> Setting up such displays, however, does involve a certain amount of detailed
> work because each step has to be defined.
--
Murray Eisenberg murray at math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts 413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street fax 413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305