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Re: Creating 'smart' textbooks with mathematica?

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg126306] Re: Creating 'smart' textbooks with mathematica?
  • From: David Reiss <dbreiss at gmail.com>
  • Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 04:40:36 -0400 (EDT)
  • Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
  • References: <jnilt6$ahg$1@smc.vnet.net>

The short answer to this is that there are many ways to program this
in Mathematica and, indeed, many ways to programmatically interact
with a notebook or notebooks in pretty much arbitrary ways. Start to
read up on Notebook Programming, style sheets, and tagging.  This will
give you a start on getting a sense of the wide scope of
possibilities.

Best,
David


On Apr 29, 2:08 am, luke wallace <lukewallace1... at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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