eBooks in Prime 5.0

[tietjee]

Mathcad v15 has eBooks as feature.  It is very helpful in documenting large analysis.  During a large project, analysis have to change to support the design changes.  The changes also have to be tracked to show the development of the design.  Not including this feature will leave Prime 5.0 as a small analysis tool, several pages.  Multi-subject analysis need to have

• Table of contents to link the information together
• Index to allow for searching
• Method to check all the links
• Finding missing values or equations that will not solve.

I am hopeful you will see the long term benefit to maintaining this feature.

Cheers

David Tg

[Fred_Kohlhepp]

While I agree with you (I use Mathcad as a stand alone tool) I'm afraid that PTC's plans for Mathcad put your desires near the bottom of the list.  It's evident (to me) that the original intent was to attach Mathcad to their modeling software, rather like a pull-up calculator, that would allow the documentation of calculations to reside in the same file. Many of their press releases and advertisements illustrate that intent.

The presence of a large group of users that don't share that dream must be frustrating.

[VladimirN]

David,

You can vote too for this idea.

[tietjee]

Agreed

[David_A]

I'm not sure if you are aware, I found article CS200084 (see link below), and according to it, there is facility (conversion of documents to Prime format + VBS scripts to build linked HTML pages) to convert Mathcad 15 (and earlier) eBooks into HTML hyperlinked documents that, upon clicking, automatically open in Mathcad Prime. The article describes the 8+ extension packs that came with various older versions of Mathcad (15, 14, 13, 12, etc.) and it included "Topics in Electrical Engineering", "Finite Element Beginnings" (Febeg.hbk), "Building Thermal Analysis" (Thermal.hbk), "Building Structural Design" (Structur.hbk), "Roarks formulas for Stress and Strain" (Roarks.hbk), "Machine Design and Analysis" (Hicks1.hbk), "Electrical and Electronics Engineering" (Hicks2.hbk) and "Electrical Power Systems Engineering" (Power.hbk).

Although there is still the HUGE loss of the live math interface of eBooks and the ability to annotate them, and copy information from them directly into Mathcad, at least there is a simple way to access the information and preserve some of their value. Check out the link below for a Word doc explaining the process and a link to the required scripts. Meanwhile, I've attached a screenshot of the result (from the link below).

BTW, I voted for the eBook suggestion for Prime 5 (there were only 6 votes including mine ).

The link to all this information is here:

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS200084

[amcgough]

Hi there,

We do want to provide functionality akin to the legacy ebooks functionality in a future release of Prime, so changing this status to 'Under Consideration'.

Table of Contents functionality (noted in the original Idea comment) is a separate item that is also under consideration to add in a future release - internal references is something I'd like to add sooner rather than later - the ability to tag a region in the worksheet and link to that region from another region in the worksheet. For example, tagging a Math region on Page 12 of a document and adding a link to that region from text in a text region somewhere else in the worksheet (clicking the link will scroll to the linked math region).

Many thanks,

Andy.