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Re: How to write a "proper" math document

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  Re: How to write a "proper" math document Murray Eisenberg <murray@math.umass.edu> - 2011-07-09 11:44 +0000
    Re: How to write a "proper" math document AES <siegman@stanford.edu> - 2011-07-10 09:05 +0000
    Re: How to write a "proper" math document Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> - 2011-07-10 09:06 +0000
    Re: How to write a "proper" math document Murray Eisenberg <murray@math.umass.edu> - 2011-07-11 10:58 +0000
      Re: How to write a "proper" math document Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> - 2011-07-12 11:07 +0000

#3628 — Re: How to write a "proper" math document

David pointed out that if you want interactive content in a .cdf, you 
have to do so by means of Manipulate. But there are situations where 
Manipulate is much too restrictive and you want other Dynamic content, 
including DynamicModule.

Also, to promote the .cdf format and CDF Player and plug-in, surely a 
more attention-getting name than "CDF" or "Computable Document Format" 
is desirable? Yes, "CDF" has a nice analogy to "PDF", but so what. (And 
just wait for Adobe to catch on and sue over the use of "DF"!)

On 7/8/11 4:54 AM, John Fultz wrote:
> David,
>
> I wanted to respond to one particular point you made in your recent post:
>
> On Thu, 7 Jul 2011 07:28:02 -0400 (EDT), David Park wrote:
>> One path is to produce a free easily obtainable Mathematica Reader on the
>> model of the Adobe Acrobat Reader. The reader could read the document,
>> operate the controls (with maybe some minor restrictions) but not much
>> else. The idea is that once users could publish in Mathematica they would
>> write more literate documents. More people would see them and decide they
>> really wanted to do the same (or use the generated knowledge) and so
>> would buy regular Mathematica themselves. I despair that WRI will ever
>> make this approach work. (A free Mathematica PlayerPro would be close but
>> they don't want to do that.) WRI puts too many restrictions and caveats
>> in their approaches such that it will never convince people that it will
>> be a general method of publication. For example, it looks as if all
>> dynamics must be via the Manipulate statement and one cannot write custom
>> dynamics. I was once hopeful, but now have doubts that this approach will
>> ever work.
>
> You've made this criticism before, and the criticism was much more valid then
> than now.  It's not clear to me from what you wrote above whether you know or
> appreciate how much things have changed.  One of your previous criticisms has
> long been that Mathematica could not simply create and maintain a native
> document which would be readable and executable by Player.  I.e., because Player
> could "play" .nb files, and Mathematica could not create .nbp files (without
> submission to a website, and all that this entails).  My understanding is that
> this a large part of why you believed Player Pro to be the superior
> solution...because Player Pro can play .nb files.
>
> But, in version 8, the situation has changed significantly.  Mathematica can now
> directly create and maintain CDF (or sometimes called "FreeCDF") files.  Player
> can play CDF files.  CDF, as they might say, is the new NBP.  There remain, of
> course, some restrictions as to what can be accomplished in the Player.  The
> broadest category of items is that CDF files created directly by Mathematica
> cannot store new content to disk.  They can't use Export[], save files, etc. (*)
> But they do support much of what you've suggested before, and much more than
> Mathematica 7 did.
>
> That you may not be aware of this isn't your fault.  Wolfram hasn't said much
> about it yet because we've been in the process of making sure that we can launch
> the right message about CDF in a strong way.  There will be a lot more to be
> said about CDF soon...I expect that before long plenty will be said on the
> Wolfram website and elsewhere describing it in much more detail.  But the
> functionality is already there, in version 8, and I encourage you to play with
> it.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> John Fultz
> jfultz@wolfram.com
> User Interface Group
> Wolfram Research, Inc.
>
>
> (*) It is possible, incidentally, to create CDF files with the capacity to,
> while running in Player, create content using Export[], saving, etc.  But that
> functionality can't be unlocked directly from within Mathematica, and more will
> be said about that later, as well.
>
>
>

-- 
Murray Eisenberg                     murray@math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower      phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts                413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street            fax   413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305

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#3634

In article <iv9eu9$dg4$1@smc.vnet.net>,
 Murray Eisenberg <murray@math.umass.edu> wrote:

> David pointed out that if you want interactive content in a .cdf, you 
> have to do so by means of Manipulate. But there are situations where 
> Manipulate is much too restrictive and you want other Dynamic content, 
> including DynamicModule.
> 
> Also, to promote the .cdf format and CDF Player and plug-in, surely a 
> more attention-getting name than "CDF" or "Computable Document Format" 
> is desirable? Yes, "CDF" has a nice analogy to "PDF", but so what. (And 
> just wait for Adobe to catch on and sue over the use of "DF"!)

DDF ?

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#3636

On 7/9/2011 4:44 AM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
> David pointed out that if you want interactive content in a .cdf, you
> have to do so by means of Manipulate. But there are situations where
> Manipulate is much too restrictive and you want other Dynamic content,
> including DynamicModule.
>
> Also, to promote the .cdf format and CDF Player and plug-in, surely a
> more attention-getting name than "CDF" or "Computable Document Format"
> is desirable? Yes, "CDF" has a nice analogy to "PDF", but so what. (And
> just wait for Adobe to catch on and sue over the use of "DF"!)

I think that there is very little likelihood of the world standardizing 
on CDF for digital distribution of mathematical documents.  There IS a 
standard, and it is different. The www has evolved document 
representation to include math, and MathML is how.  Numerous programs, 
including Mathematica, can use MathML.  Is this a good standard?  Eh, 
probably not the simplest way of representing a Mathematica notebook.

However, one can, via "save-as", save a Mathematica notebook as XML+MathML.



There is another standard, "OpenMath" which is more ambitious.

I have been critical of both of these, in part because they are 
incredibly verbose.  But no one has to look at the internals.

One possibility is that by means of a click a browser displaying MathML 
might stuff the MathML into a computer algebra system.  This is
the kind of thing I was hoping the NIST would consider in its digital
library.  I see no reason that Mathematica cannot be linked to MathML
in a web document, if the browser is running in a Mathematica-ready 
computer system.

If it is not already programmed as the inverse of "save-as" XML, I 
imagine it would take only a few lines of code (probably in jscript) to 
suck up (suitable) XML documents into Mathematica.   Actually, I
glanced at the output XML, from Mathematica and it is not really 
suitable as Mathematica input, (in version 7 anyway).

But it could be made to work, in my opinion.

It might even make documents that could be read on telephones.

RJF






>
> On 7/8/11 4:54 AM, John Fultz wrote:
>> David,
>>
>> I wanted to respond to one particular point you made in your recent post:
>>
>> On Thu, 7 Jul 2011 07:28:02 -0400 (EDT), David Park wrote:
>>> One path is to produce a free easily obtainable Mathematica Reader on the
>>> model of the Adobe Acrobat Reader. The reader could read the document,
>>> operate the controls (with maybe some minor restrictions) but not much
>>> else. The idea is that once users could publish in Mathematica they would
>>> write more literate documents. More people would see them and decide they
>>> really wanted to do the same (or use the generated knowledge) and so
>>> would buy regular Mathematica themselves. I despair that WRI will ever
>>> make this approach work. (A free Mathematica PlayerPro would be close but
>>> they don't want to do that.) WRI puts too many restrictions and caveats
>>> in their approaches such that it will never convince people that it will
>>> be a general method of publication. For example, it looks as if all
>>> dynamics must be via the Manipulate statement and one cannot write custom
>>> dynamics. I was once hopeful, but now have doubts that this approach will
>>> ever work.
>>
>> You've made this criticism before, and the criticism was much more valid then
>> than now.  It's not clear to me from what you wrote above whether you know or
>> appreciate how much things have changed.  One of your previous criticisms has
>> long been that Mathematica could not simply create and maintain a native
>> document which would be readable and executable by Player.  I.e., because Player
>> could "play" .nb files, and Mathematica could not create .nbp files (without
>> submission to a website, and all that this entails).  My understanding is that
>> this a large part of why you believed Player Pro to be the superior
>> solution...because Player Pro can play .nb files.
>>
>> But, in version 8, the situation has changed significantly.  Mathematica can now
>> directly create and maintain CDF (or sometimes called "FreeCDF") files.  Player
>> can play CDF files.  CDF, as they might say, is the new NBP.  There remain, of
>> course, some restrictions as to what can be accomplished in the Player.  The
>> broadest category of items is that CDF files created directly by Mathematica
>> cannot store new content to disk.  They can't use Export[], save files, etc. (*)
>> But they do support much of what you've suggested before, and much more than
>> Mathematica 7 did.
>>
>> That you may not be aware of this isn't your fault.  Wolfram hasn't said much
>> about it yet because we've been in the process of making sure that we can launch
>> the right message about CDF in a strong way.  There will be a lot more to be
>> said about CDF soon...I expect that before long plenty will be said on the
>> Wolfram website and elsewhere describing it in much more detail.  But the
>> functionality is already there, in version 8, and I encourage you to play with
>> it.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> John Fultz
>> jfultz@wolfram.com
>> User Interface Group
>> Wolfram Research, Inc.
>>
>>
>> (*) It is possible, incidentally, to create CDF files with the capacity to,
>> while running in Player, create content using Export[], saving, etc.  But that
>> functionality can't be unlocked directly from within Mathematica, and more will
>> be said about that later, as well.
>>
>>
>>
>

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#3653

Due to its verbosity alone, MathML is an utterly horrible language for 
directly writing or reading mathematical expressions. (La)TeX, by 
contrast, is infinitely more writable and readable. Even more readable 
(and writable) than Content MathML.

Moreover, not all browsers natively render MathML, e.g., Safari on a Mac.


On 7/10/11 5:02 AM, Richard Fateman wrote:
>
> ...I think that there is very little likelihood of the world standardizing
> on CDF for digital distribution of mathematical documents.  There IS a
> standard, and it is different. The www has evolved document
> representation to include math, and MathML is how.  Numerous programs,
> including Mathematica, can use MathML.  Is this a good standard?  Eh,
> probably not the simplest way of representing a Mathematica notebook.
>
> However, one can, via "save-as", save a Mathematica notebook as XML+MathML.
>
> There is another standard, "OpenMath" which is more ambitious.
>
> I have been critical of both of these, in part because they are
> incredibly verbose....

-- 
Murray Eisenberg                     murray@math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower      phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts                413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street            fax   413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305

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#3675

On 7/11/2011 3:58 AM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
> Due to its verbosity alone, MathML is an utterly horrible language for
> directly writing or reading mathematical expressions.

This is entirely true and I think no one disagrees.  So is HTML.
Neither MathML nor HTML is generally written directly, but is a target 
language for editors and automatic generators of one sort or another.

I never directly write MathML, but then I rarely write Latex except for 
very small pieces.  I can generate Latex from a computer algebra system.

So the actual readability of MathML is not so important.  The fact is 
that it is a standard.   The way I would use it  (and at least one CAS 
does this) is to generate the blecherous MathML code but have in it a 
comment which says how a human would write it in the CAS syntax.


  (La)TeX, by
> contrast, is infinitely more writable and readable. Even more readable
> (and writable) than Content MathML.
>
> Moreover, not all browsers natively render MathML, e.g., Safari on a Mac.

That is probably a good reason not to use Safari for math documents.

Until relatively recently (and maybe even now), MathML is rarely used.
PDF for math dominates.  I haven't looked at recent surveys though.

RJF

>
>
> On 7/10/11 5:02 AM, Richard Fateman wrote:
>>
>> ...I think that there is very little likelihood of the world standardizing
>> on CDF for digital distribution of mathematical documents.  There IS a
>> standard, and it is different. The www has evolved document
>> representation to include math, and MathML is how.  Numerous programs,
>> including Mathematica, can use MathML.  Is this a good standard?  Eh,
>> probably not the simplest way of representing a Mathematica notebook.
>>
>> However, one can, via "save-as", save a Mathematica notebook as XML+MathML.
>>
>> There is another standard, "OpenMath" which is more ambitious.
>>
>> I have been critical of both of these, in part because they are
>> incredibly verbose....
>

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