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)..