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Creating 'smart' textbooks with mathematica?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg126287] Creating 'smart' textbooks with mathematica?
  • From: luke wallace <lukewallace1990 at gmail.com>
  • Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2012 02:07:42 -0400 (EDT)
  • Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com

I have a technical PDF that is hard to read because you could be on
pave 500 and it will tell you to "refer sections 1.1.4.5, 2.2.1.5,
3.4.3.2, and 6.1.2.4 for the rest of the information you need."

So you have to jump around the book, finding these sections, going
back and forth all day.

If Mathematica could automatically create 'links' to jump to section
headers throughout the whole book in one command for every section
header, then this would revolutionize the functionality of technical e-
books and make them ten times easier to understand.

In all technical books, the actual "Section 1.1" for example is always
different than the mere reference to "Section 1.1" because the real
one will be in bold, italics, a bigger font size, etc no matter where
it is actually randomly located.

Going through one by one and creating interlinks would take forever,
this one book alone I have has about 12,000 needed to be made.

So, if Mathematica could simply link all font size 10 text to the font
size 14 text of an identical string for all duplicate text strings
found, it would do this for all 12,000 references automatically!

Another way would be to link all non-bold font strings to their bold
counterparts.

Currently, Acrobat X, InDesign, FrameMaker, MS Word, and others can't
do this based on merely font size or font style.

Can anyone find a way to do this? By the way, I can easily convert the
PDF to Mathematica since the PDF has editable text. So that isn't an
obstacle.



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