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.)