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Re: Mathematica formatting for large documents

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg29522] Re: Mathematica formatting for large documents
  • From: aes <siegman at stanford.edu>
  • Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 01:47:03 -0400 (EDT)
  • Organization: Stanford University
  • References: <9guotm$o07$1@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

In article <9guotm$o07$1 at smc.vnet.net>, axc at poincare.EECS.cwru.edu 
wrote:

> i'd like some tips or urls for style sheets that i could use directly
> or modify - to write my phd thesis. grad office is medievally anal
> about formatting.  i'm especially worried about subtle bugs/problems.
> eg importing eps and font issues etc. thanks in advance
> 
> alan calvitti
> eecs
> case western reserve u
> 

I hope you don't take this as one of those replies that ignores your 
question and gives advice you didn't ask for -- but are there good and 
necessary reasons you need to try to format a complete dissertation in 
Mathematica?

Given the attitudes of your grad office (which were gotten rid of at my 
university a decade ago when budget cuts got rid of most of the grad 
office itself), as well as software realities, you might be a lot 
happier with TeX or LaTeX.  Superb real-time WYSIWYG implementations of 
TeX for all platforms are available (e.g., Textures for the Mac), and 
it's easy to learn.

I've used both Mathematica and TeX a lot. Obvioously TeX doesn't do what Mathematica 
does as regards calculating; but trying to control and accomplish 
desirable formatting in Mathematica is for sure the most frustrating, ungodly 
complicated, and poorly documented (better, pretty much undocumented) 
aspect of Mathematica.  (Look back at some of the lengthy discussions on this NG 
in the past just over trying to get the page breaking function to work 
properly.)

If I were faced with generating a lot of stuff in Mathematica, then trying to 
format it, I might even resort to having Mathematica write out its output to a 
text file in "quasi TeX', then touch up that file by hand and typeset in 
TeX.


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