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Date and Time in Headers (odd quirk)

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg31119] Date and Time in Headers (odd quirk)
  • From: aes <siegman at stanford.edu>
  • Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 03:36:36 -0400 (EDT)
  • Organization: Stanford University
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Just want to pass along an odd little quirk in how Mathematica handles dates and 
times in headers for printing.  If you put

   Cell[ TextData[ {ValueBox[ "Date"]}, ", ", 
                           {ValueBox[ "Time"]}],"Header"]

in one of the header fields, the date and time will be printed in the 
corresponding header of the printed page in the form

      10/3/01, 10:51:04

While sorting through some printed notebooks, I just noticed that if you 
print a notebook having say a dozen pages, the seconds digit in the 
printed header typically advances by a digit or two between each page, 
so that the header is slightly different on most of the successive 
pages.  

(Haven't printed any notebooks long enough to see if the minute or hour 
digits -- or even the date digits? -- will advance similarly.)

(Example was done using Mathematica 4.1 on Mac PG G3, OS 8.6, hp LaserJet 6MP.)

I have no valid reason to complain about this -- no obvious situations 
where having a different date of record on different pages would cause a 
problem (though I'd bet there could be some far-out situation where it 
could matter).

However, I guess my mental image from mainframe days is that a Print 
command generates a "print job", which is sent to the printer as a batch 
or a single print file -- in fact, isn't that what happens with most 
printers? -- and it would seem intuitive that the date and time should 
be somehow associated with the "job", rather than with each individual 
page.

(And I just noticed an additional quirk in this example:  How come 
there's a prepended zero for single-digit days, but not for single-digit 
months?  Nits, nits.)


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