Re: Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg99815] Re: [mg99776] Re: Introducing the Wolfram Mathematica Tutorial
- From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
- Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 04:19:18 -0400 (EDT)
- Reply-to: jfultz at wolfram.com
On Thu, 14 May 2009 01:40:58 -0400 (EDT), AES wrote: > In article <gue2l2$7mk$1 at smc.vnet.net>, > > Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net> wrote: > >> But Spotlight isn't the only tool available on a Mac for doing >> searches on a Mac. There are the Unix tools find and grep which >> allow searches for any text in any file regardless of whether it >> is part of an application package or not. Additionally, this can >> be done from Mathematica itself using FindList with FileNames. >> And all of this works just fine with notebooks. In fact, since >> notebooks are ASCII files, these tools work better with >> notebooks than PDF files. >> > Many of the documentation notebooks in Mathematica seem to open with > many of their cells closed, and in a "paged" mode (you only see one page > on screen, so far as I can tell, and have to jump from page to page, > rather than scrolling continuously). > > So do these various tools find stuff in closed cells? > > And if you're viewing some documentation notebook on screen and do a > search, willl these tools open the closed cell for each hit, and let you > jump down through all the pages and see all the hits using, for example, > the key combo Cmd-G? (which is a fairly widely used standard for "Find > Next" in many other situations). This absolutely works (both Command+G on the Mac and finding in closed groups). But this is something of an apples and oranges comparison. The PDFs are generated from the tutorial notebooks, which generally don't have the cell groups closed as you describe. I'm sure you're generally thinking of the function reference pages here. But your implication that closed cell groups are somehow immune to Find is not correct. I use this feature regularly, for example, to find all examples for a function which use a particular option. You are correct, of course, about the Find feature being limited to the scope of the existing documentation notebook. It won't find anything in separate documentation notebooks which are linked sequentially in the narrative. Sincerely, John Fultz jfultz at wolfram.com User Interface Group Wolfram Research, Inc.