Re: Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg99718] Re: [mg99706] Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial
- From: DrMajorBob <btreat1 at austin.rr.com>
- Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 03:08:28 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <gu3aub$t$1@smc.vnet.net> <200905111028.GAA07139@smc.vnet.net>
- Reply-to: drmajorbob at bigfoot.com
In addition, the Mac OS/X Spotlight will search _all_ text PDFs on the disk for a word or phrase, almost instantly. Every PDF that includes the word BinCounts, say, appears at once. Each promising document has to be opened separately for a local search, but it's not hard to ignore your own notebooks if you want to, or FOCUS on your own code examples, if you prefer. This would also work for Doc center notebooks if they were (a) on the disk and (b) NOT in system directories ignored by Spotlight. (So it DOESN'T work for Doc center notebooks.) Bobby On Mon, 11 May 2009 05:28:00 -0500, Bob F <deepyogurt at gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > -- DrMajorBob at bigfoot.com
- References:
- Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection
- From: Bob F <deepyogurt@gmail.com>
- Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial Collection