General advice on making slides that show examples
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg124486] General advice on making slides that show examples
- From: Mark Green <p0073857 at brookes.ac.uk>
- Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2012 05:17:18 -0500 (EST)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
So, I've just been trying to use Mathematica to create some active slides I can use to show students how parametric graphing works. I managed to create the following function I can use generally: ParaExample[xi_, yi_] := Grid[{{ Manipulate[ ParametricPlot[{xi, yi}, {t, 0, tmax}, PlotRange -> {{0, 300}, {0, 400}}], {tmax, 0.01, 1}], CellGroup[{ ExpressionCell[TraditionalForm[x == xi]], ExpressionCell[TraditionalForm[y == yi]] }] }}, ItemSize -> {{Scaled[1] - 10, 10}}] Can this be done better? There are a few awkward things about this. The display of the formulae appears in a tiny little sub-box floating in space to the right of the graph, and the majority of the slide's width is blank space - there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Mathematica to use all of the available width, which is what I was trying to do with the Scaled declaration at the end of the Grid. Also, on the first slide that uses this function I have to declare it in an Initialization Cell (.. I think?) but although I can Close that cell it still shows up as a messy line on the slide (I'm using the NaturalColours style - is there anywhere to download Stylesheets from?). Is there a way to hide the cell completely (but some way I can still open it to edit it if I need to?) I tried going out into Working environment and placing it before the first slide, but this just made it Slide 0. I'd basically just be grateful for any advice on how I can improve this. I already need to change it to allow the PlotRange to be altered since otherwise it scales with tmax and there's no visible change when tmax is increased on a straight line graph (apart from to the scale, which isn't really very illustrative)..