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Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg99706] Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection
• From: Bob F <deepyogurt at gmail.com>
• Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 06:28:00 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <gu3aub$t$1@smc.vnet.net>

On May 9, 1:21 am, Bill Rowe <readn... at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On 5/7/09 at 6:33 AM, sieg... at stanford.edu (AES) wrote:
>
>
>
> >Bob F (author of the original post appended below) and I are
> >evidently very much in agreement about the value of PDF
> >documentation.  Let me just add one note.
> >Split windows are certainly good, particularly if you have either
> >large (or multiple) monitors and/or excellent eyesight.
> >An equally good, maybe even better, alternative is to be able to
> >jump back and forth (preferably with a single keystroke or
> >mouseclick) between two different full-screen "environments" or
> >"views", with Mathematica open and running in one of these and the
> >PDF documentation open and viewable in some reader-friendly
> >application in the other.
> >The "Spaces" capability in Apple's Leopard OS provides a
> >sophisticated way to do this; the Cmd-Tab application switching
> >capability in earlier Mac operating systems is almost equally handy.
> >I'd assume there are equivalent capabilities on most other
> >platforms.
>
> On the Mac platform, you can do precisely this with the existing
> online documentation as follows:
>
> Open the documentation center
> Hit the key that shows all spaces (for me F7)
> Drag the documentation center window to an empty space
>
> Now you can switch from the space running your main notebook to
> the space with the documentation center by using whatever key
> stroke you set up to switch among the spaces you've set up. This
> has the added benefit over PDF documentation of being able to
> copy and paste from whatever you are viewing in the
> documentation center window to your running notebook.
>
> In fact, on the Mac, I cannot see any benefit to PDF
> documentation over the existing online documentation.

You can set your own Bookmarks, you can add notes, you can search for
a string and see all the occurances at once and then click on any one
of them to go to a specific spot in the document, you could even merge
your own notes into the document by inserting pages from one PDF to
another and the resulting document would be a whole lot more useful to
your specific needs. I would wager there are more...

All these things are something I do with Acrobat Professional, not
sure if Acrobat Reader does them all.

So, can you do any of that with the DC interface - NOPE. Are these of
benefit? For some yes, and some no.

But, there are some things you can't do - and these have been pointed
out in other threads here.

So, neither format is perfect, just choose the one that has what you
need to do for the moment.

-Bob

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial
    • From: DrMajorBob <btreat1@austin.rr.com>