Re: Scaling JPEGs or TIFFs inside PDF slides (using Illustrator)?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg98571] Re: [mg98467] Scaling JPEGs or TIFFs inside PDF slides (using Illustrator)?
- From: "David Park" <djmpark at comcast.net>
- Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 03:32:59 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <19690316.1239357703079.JavaMail.root@n11>
AES, Nobody is in a position to 'insist' that a person should stay entirely within Mathematica! And, in fact, today the dominant mode for communication of technical material is to go outside of it. Mathematica notebooks are not even an acceptable mode of publication. Nevertheless, in the aspects of learning, research, development and communication Mathematica has and is becoming better and better. The active and dynamic features of Mathematica are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better than static documents, or even documents that link to animations or deployed demonstrations. Consider using Workbench to write an application that contains not only one or more packages but also folders of notebooks or slideshows that are relatively finished and that present various common topics or developed results of your subject matter. The folders could also contain other kinds of files - maybe a PDF paper you have written on the subject matter. You might even have an organized directory of folders. The packages would contain the accumulated routines and documentation that were a major result of your efforts. There is no reason to let this active knowledge slip through your fingers - or have it scattered in many unorganized notebooks. If you were giving a lecture and someone asked a question outside a fixed presentation, using the active knowledge in the application, you could often quickly redo the presentation or even do new ones on the fly. Instead of writing on a whiteboard you might write in a new Mathematica notebook and obtain neat results without all the typos and sloppiness that can creep into static hand written material. It is much easier to bring outside static material into a Mathematica application than to bring Mathematica into a basically static medium. But, for the most part, this is for the future because not everybody can read Mathematica applications as they can read PDF files. David Park djmpark at comcast.net http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/ From: AES [mailto:siegman at stanford.edu] My question for the PDF profis here is: When I do this rescaling of a raster image within a PDF document, using Illustrator, is Illustrator actually building a complete new (rescaled) raster image inside the PDF document, and keeping it in the PDF along with the originally placed version? Or does it just keep the rescaled version and discard the original one? Or does it just insert a brief command for the image to be rescaled "on the fly" any time the PDF is projected or printed? Thanks for any info and assistance. ------------- [And as an addendum, I'm copying this post to cssmm frankly to tweak some of the people who argue that all presentations in the future should and must be done directly from Mathematica notebooks and nothing else (and, secondarily, that _all_ of the capabilities I've mentioned above should and must be built into and carried out from one single, massive, eventually un-learnable and un-documentable Mathematica application. I have no objection at all to making presentations direct from a live Mathematica notebook in situations for example where this might be a not too lengthy, single-topic or one-shot discussion, maybe in a class or group meeting or informal situation, of material that can be covered from a single Mathematica notebook. That makes total sense. But suppose you have a collection of literally many hundreds if not thousands of slides and graphics, some generated by Mathematica, others collected from all over the place, over many years; and you're continually re-organizing and re-purposing and revising these (or copies of them), for presentations at different levels, to different audiences, or in different formats, on screen, in reports, in papers, in books. Suppose, as would be the case if you insisted on the "Mathematica notebook only" approach, that these materials may have come from many dozens of different Mathematica notebooks, assembled over a dozen plus years, in a half-dozen successive versions of Mathematica (so that some of these notebooks will not even execute any more; and those that still do are likely produce different results than they originally did). So, to do this repurposing, or assembling a new presentation from a lot of varied existing sources, you're going to try to pull out and reassemble bits and pieces from these dozens of notebooks, into a new notebook for your upcoming presentation? And debug that? And then, every time you want to make even some small but significant change in one or a few slides in a many megabyte notebook, you have to re-edit and re-run it? Insane!! In the approach I'm suggesting, and using, any time I want to add a live or interactive demo as one part of a presentation -- and I've been programming interactive onscreen demos for teaching, for research, for professional presentations, and for my own education, using multiple computer tools, since the late 1980s[1] -- it's trivially easy to just add a link to that Mathematica demo or animation (or Flash or QuickTime or whatever material) from within the PDF (or PowerPoint, or Keynote, or whatever) presentation or online document. Mathematica has long been a truly great (even "insanely great") tool, and still is. But a lot of what it's currently doing as regards its overall approach, documentation, and interface, strikes me as just plain insane. ----------------- [1] For a 1991 invited presentation and article I prepared on this topic of this post (and which I think is still pretty good nearly two decades later), you can take a look at the link below. Those of you too junior to recall Apple's "Knowledge Navigator" buzz-phrase, or MIT's "Athena Experiment", or the concept of the "3M-3K" computer, may find it interesting. <http://www.stanford.edu/~siegman/computer_display_tools_spie_1991.pdf> [also at <https://www.spie.org/etop/1991/338_1.pdf>]