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Re: How to write a "proper" math document

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  • Subject: [mg120103] Re: How to write a "proper" math document
  • From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
  • Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 04:54:17 -0400 (EDT)
  • Reply-to: jfultz at wolfram.com

David,

I wanted to respond to one particular point you made in your recent post:

On Thu, 7 Jul 2011 07:28:02 -0400 (EDT), David Park wrote:
> One path is to produce a free easily obtainable Mathematica Reader on the
> model of the Adobe Acrobat Reader. The reader could read the document,
> operate the controls (with maybe some minor restrictions) but not much
> else. The idea is that once users could publish in Mathematica they would
> write more literate documents. More people would see them and decide they
> really wanted to do the same (or use the generated knowledge) and so
> would buy regular Mathematica themselves. I despair that WRI will ever
> make this approach work. (A free Mathematica PlayerPro would be close but
> they don't want to do that.) WRI puts too many restrictions and caveats
> in their approaches such that it will never convince people that it will
> be a general method of publication. For example, it looks as if all
> dynamics must be via the Manipulate statement and one cannot write custom
> dynamics. I was once hopeful, but now have doubts that this approach will
> ever work.

You've made this criticism before, and the criticism was much more valid then 
than now.  It's not clear to me from what you wrote above whether you know or 
appreciate how much things have changed.  One of your previous criticisms has 
long been that Mathematica could not simply create and maintain a native 
document which would be readable and executable by Player.  I.e., because Player 
could "play" .nb files, and Mathematica could not create .nbp files (without 
submission to a website, and all that this entails).  My understanding is that 
this a large part of why you believed Player Pro to be the superior 
solution...because Player Pro can play .nb files.

But, in version 8, the situation has changed significantly.  Mathematica can now 
directly create and maintain CDF (or sometimes called "FreeCDF") files.  Player 
can play CDF files.  CDF, as they might say, is the new NBP.  There remain, of 
course, some restrictions as to what can be accomplished in the Player.  The 
broadest category of items is that CDF files created directly by Mathematica 
cannot store new content to disk.  They can't use Export[], save files, etc. (*) 
But they do support much of what you've suggested before, and much more than 
Mathematica 7 did.

That you may not be aware of this isn't your fault.  Wolfram hasn't said much 
about it yet because we've been in the process of making sure that we can launch 
the right message about CDF in a strong way.  There will be a lot more to be 
said about CDF soon...I expect that before long plenty will be said on the 
Wolfram website and elsewhere describing it in much more detail.  But the 
functionality is already there, in version 8, and I encourage you to play with 
it.

Sincerely,

John Fultz
jfultz at wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.


(*) It is possible, incidentally, to create CDF files with the capacity to, 
while running in Player, create content using Export[], saving, etc.  But that 
functionality can't be unlocked directly from within Mathematica, and more will 
be said about that later, as well.




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