Re: Various documents posted by PTC staff

Valery, the point was not how to solve that one expression I grabbed as an example, thats nonsignifcant. Look at the sheets - you will read about blue underline cursors you can expand by pressing space, read about adding plots by typing a comma, etc., etc. The conversion of those sheets is simply a sloppy work - no wonder, a lot of sheets to do probably in a short time. But as you can read I didn't aim my post at a specific person but at PTC staff in general

To stay with the phrase you cited and taking the first meaning in the link you provided: PTC has a new piano which is still out of tune and an old one which is not. Somebody is responsible for the fact that the wrong one is already played.

Addendum: The sheets which are now converted to feign content existing for Prime are older than I thought. Not even Mathcad 15 will yield the result given using static symbolics. So obviously those sheets were written for something like Mathcad 11 with Maple as symbolics. Great job!

@Tudor, as I assume that you are not only the person who posted the sheets but also the one whose task was to convert them: I am sorry to have to say that, but ist not enough to simply convert the sheets and delete the paragraphs which obviously deal with subjects not available in Prime anymore. Those sheets have to be rewritten if they should make any sense (unless of course if the intended sense is to be able to show how much content is already available for Prime). In doing so you should also highlight the subjects which Prime can do better than older versions of Mathcad (yes, there are a few). As an example in one of the graphing tutorials I found a long winding paragraph how to get Mathcad (sorry, Prime) to plot a graph showing feets instead of the SI units meters. This is far easier in Prime now and the "converted" sheet should reflect that, I think.

And please reread the sheets before posting - a lot of them has horrible page breaks. Especially those inside of a text region are inferiour! Personally I consider the handling of page break a severe Prime bug, but its there and if you publish you have to deal with it (adding hard page breaks, adding lines in a text region, etc.)

It could well be that some of the posted documents aren't just sloppy conversions from old e-books but are worth looking at, but if there are some, I simply didn't hit them. Prime is far too slow in starting and handling so I just gave a very few of the last posted documents a look. Would be a good idea to add pdf's of the files as well - they are quick and easily accessed and they even may be a teaser for potential customers.

Concerning your suggestion to hire co-ops for document conversion I think its too soon to do so. First Prime has to be brought to a level compareable to old Mathcad, then you could do the conversion and highlight the new improvements.

Those files in the document sections of this forum (which as I guess are supposed to replace the old repository, PTC has killed) are somewhat a mess and hard to access and the nicely made table of contents doesn't change that much on this. Sometimes files which belong together are posted as separate documents, sometimes they are packed in a zip and have to be unpacked first - no uniform line. Of course one drawback seems to be that the forums document feature doesn't make is easy to post multiple files and again Primes lack of hyperlinking sheets does the rest. The latter feature shouldn't be that hard to (re)implement, though.

That growth of files in the document section reminds me on the impression I got from the development of Prime - looks like the same handwriting/signature - and that not a compliment.

Seems not to be so easy.

I do not apply myself as proof reader but just had a glance at the newly posted Basics Tutorial:

Wrong again! We need to type the space bar three times to get the desired result! And again an awful page break.

Hmm - so whats the difference apart from the inconsistent type face/font size?

Again in the secon expression you need to type space three times.

Roger Yeh wrote: That said, a lot of the old e-books contained good info,

Agreed! It was good info for a good software.

So why not wait until Prime is a good software, too, and offers the features necessary. Maybe we can get hyperlinks, better looking pagebreaks and all the other things we are missing in a future version of Prime. And maybe PTC decides to provide a better place to offer those files more clearly arranged. IMHO its not until then that work of PTC staff put in conversion and reviewing would make sense.