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.