copying cells in Mathematica 4.2--problem solved!
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg38102] copying cells in Mathematica 4.2--problem solved!
- From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz at mimuw.edu.pl>
- Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 04:31:50 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
I am about to describe one of the strangest experiences with a software "bug" that I have ever had. It now looks that, partly thanks to the help of other members of this list, I have managed to solve this most irritating problem. But the true cause of it remains still mysterious and so does the response I got from WRI's technical support. First of all, while waiting for response from the mathgroup, I decided to sent a bug report to WRI's technical support. The answer came on the next day. Moreover, it acknowledged this as a "known bug" and suggested a way round it. The suggestion was to copy the notebook using "Copy As Complete Notebook" menu item and then paste cells from the new notebook. Unfortunately this solution proved imperfect. It is true that it solved the visible markup problem but cells were still being merged into a single cell and the only thing I could do about it was to break them up again using the "Divide Cell" menu item, hardly a convenient way to go about copying cells. I more or less gave up (particularly once i received the first response form a mathgroup user confirming that he also had the problem) and tried to persuade myself that using Mathematica in Classic was not all that bad when I got a message from Yas Tesiram stating that he was using 4.2 on Mac OS X 10.2 and did not have the problem at all. At this point I was still pretty certain that there was indeed a bug, and that it must have been fixed in a recent release that Yas managed to get (I have to admit to suspecting WRI at this point about deliberately keeping me in the dark about the existence of a such a more recent release-- sorry about that). The breakthrough came when I got a message from TOm Burton who told me that he had this problem once but he cured it by deleting and re-installing Mathematica. I immediately tried his approach but it did not work. But now I was not prepared to give up. I created a new user, logged out as myself and logged in again as the new user. Guess what, the problem was gone. I started frantically possible culprits in my ~/Library and also for any applications that were set to run on start up. I soon noticed a possible culprit, a little freeware program called PTHPasteboard which creates multiple-clipboards. I removed it and the problem was gone. Everything seems to be fine again. Now the biggest mystery: why did technical support so quickly acknowledged a bug, which may not be one at all? Could this be something to do with the frequency of complaints (eg.g on this list ) that they are too slow to acknowledge bugs and to often refuse to accept them as such? Actually, now I begin to feel that there may be perhaps something to be said for this attitude, and certainly it seesm preferable to its opposite: too great a readiness to accept claims of bugs which may after all not be that at all. Andrzej Kozlowski Yokohama, Japan http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~akoz/ http://platon.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/andrzej/ On Friday, November 29, 2002, at 04:07 AM, Andrzej Kozlowski wrote: > I am having an extremely frustrating time with one "feature" of > Mathematica 4.2 which I swear was not present in earlier versions. It > find is quite dreadful and yet none seems to have complained about it > so far so that I feel that perhaps I missing something obvious. > Anyway, this is the problem. I have two notebooks with a large number > of cells each. I want to copy some cells from one notebook to the > other. I am sure in earlier versions it used to be possible to select > several contiguous cells by shift clicking and then paste them into > another notebook. You would then get several cells of the same type as > you copied. However now (at least on Mac OS X) this seems impossible. > What happens is that if you select a several cells or a cell group and > past into another notebook you get a messy expression contained in a > single cell from which it does not appear possible to easily recover > the original cells. I have tired using various Copy As but have not > found anything that works. The only thing that works is copying and > pasting individual cells, which is of course very time consuming. > Is this also what happens on other platforms? I am sure it was not the > case in earlier versions, and if so was this an intentional change? It > so it seems to me as bad an idea as I have come across in many years. > Can anyone explain? > > Andrzej Kozlowski > > > >