Mathcad Prime 6.0 is out!

Author

15-Moonstone

thanks for the reply. unfortunately, that seems more geared toward a corporate user who wants to work at home too. that's great, but doesn't apply to me. it looks like i'll have to use prime express. it would be nice if there was something for hobby use, like what maple offers. mathcad licensing seems to be either corporate or student, and i'm neither. i'm a retired aerospace engineer. so just using it at home. mostly for documentation for public domain software that i offer.

it's my understanding that you can download mathcad 15 if you have a license to prime. is that correct? there's nothing on the ptc estore, i'm basing this on forum posts i've read.

lastly, i first thought prime 6 improved the plotting. but the website is deceptive. it may be they are referring to old fixes they made, which people weren't happy with. so i'm not as sure as i was with my original post.

anthony

23-Emerald IV

If you've never installed mathcad 15 before you can try that out for 30 days as well. The difference with Prime is that after 30 days mathcad 15 goes off, period. ( unless you throw money in).

Luc.

25-Diamond I

Based on all the forum posts, it looks like Prime 6 delivers a lot more than people expected. It seems to address a lot of the gripes. I'm curious what the new symbolic engine is. Is it home grown or licensed from someone. The Knitro solver is mentioned, but I think that's something different.

Not sure what exactly you mean by "address a lot of the gripes". It was already told in another thread that we can expect a spell checker and custom margins in P6 - the interesting thing is that PTC seems to find it even worthwhile to mention those "features". Both feature should be standard anyway and do not address the main points of criticism of Prime.

The highly praised numeric Knitro solvers from Artelys were implemented in Prime from the very beginning AFAIR. In actual work they proved not much advantage over the formerly used implemented algorithms. In some cases (there are some forum threads about it) they performs even worse. While in old Mathcad you could chose among a couple of different algorithms and could change some parameters there, there is no such option in Prime - if it doesn't come to a solution there is no way you can tune it.

The real surprise about P6 is that there is a new symbolic engine. Haven't heard that PTC would work on that project. Its also unclear if its a PTC development or a third party software. Obviously PTC does not like to pay license fees to MathWorks for that age-old version of MuPad in the long run (MuPad in MatLab is much newer and more powerful and flexible). PTC seems to see it as a work in progress as the website states that the results may look different to what you are used to and that for the next few versions of Prime (= next few years ?) you have the option to switch back to Mupad for the symbolic calculations. Does not sound promising but we have to give it a test run someday to see whats it worth.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad/Mathcad-Prime-6-0-Symbolic-Engine-based-on-Axiom-Fricas/m-p/629436/highlight/true#M187308

25-Diamond I

Does not sound promising but we have to give it a test run someday to see whats it worth.

Couldn't wait 😉 So here's the result of my first test of the new symbolic engine.

N

Nicholas

1-Visitor

On the contrary, it sounds very promising.

D

DJF

16-Pearl

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/mathcad/new-release

Customization of margin dimensions, including headers and footers
Spellcheck available option and supports multiple languages
Add hyperlinks directly in worksheets
Expanded list of print options, and find/replace subscripts or individual parts of identifiers
2D chart application options such as exporting plot as an image file
New symbolic calculation engine

I guess a new symbolic engine is exciting. Hope it's an improvement. The rest.... what is this, 1995?

25-Diamond I

I guess a new symbolic engine is exciting.

Fully agreed on.

A new version of Mathcad with a modern new code base would be as exciting (and necessary), but PTC was not able or willing to provide a decent piece of software with comparable capability in more than 10 years.

Nonetheless - they made me curious and so I guess I will testdrive it next weekend.

Hope it's an improvement.

Really!? OK, its said that hope dies last. I read that we will be able to switch back to the old symbolic engine (MuPad) for the next few versions of Prime. So it looks like PTC sees the new symbolic as a work in progress and thats not exactly trustworthy.
Does anybody know if the new symbolic is a third party software and who developed it? Given the mediocre 2D plot component which they obviously were not able to develop themselves I hardly can image they would be able to create a symbolic engine.

The rest.... what is this, 1995?

Well said. Look at it as a couple of bug fixes.

F

Fred_Kohlhepp

23-Emerald I

You've all missed (or I haven't seen) the big news: 2D plotting is now as good as Mathcad 15 was! (Or is that still the add-in?

" PTC Mathcad Prime 6.0 Platform Support and System Requirements document (PDF)"

23-Emerald IV

Typical PTC:

On the download page for Prime 6 is a link to

Which gives you the requirements for Prime 5.0.0.0

F

Fred_Kohlhepp

23-Emerald I

Interesting! When I downloaded it I got Prime 4,0

23-Emerald IV

Prime 6 (as well as Prime 5) only install on 64-bit Windows.

Is your windows 64-bit, or 32 ?

Luc

23-Emerald IV

Here's another one. It says: "Click Finish to exit the PTC Installation Assistant."

Clicking the dark green "Finish" field to the left does nothing.

I wonder if I should click the "Exit >" button at the lower right...

Author

15-Moonstone

i tried twice to download prime 6 but never got the link. i tried emailing them and having heard anything. thanks for the tip about asking them for a retiree type license. if i ever hear anything back i will.

https://www.ptc.com/en/products/mathcad-express-free-download

23-Emerald IV

It should be that if you register here:

you get an email from PTC with a download link....

Author

15-Moonstone

yeah, that worked for me in the past. but it's not working for me now. i tried twice and finally emailed them. but crickets...

J

JeffH1

16-Pearl

I'm in the process of downloading and installing, but one big hitter for me is the addition of embedding hyperlinks. This might actually make eBooks possible again in Prime.

25-Diamond I

@JeffH1 wrote:

I'm in the process of downloading and installing, but one big hitter for me is the addition of embedding hyperlinks. This might actually make eBooks possible again in Prime.

Haven't tried yet, but from what I've read you can link to websites, locally stored files or (not sure) call external programs.

But to make eBooks possible again we would need a mechanism to link to a specific place in a specific Prime file.

J

JeffH1

16-Pearl

Most eBooks ( Hicks' ME, Roark's Formulas, Hicks' EEE, and including my own) use a Table of Contents (TOC) page that contains links out to individual topics in separate documents and the requisite links back to the TOC in each of those. While jumping within a document was useful in Mathcad 15, not many of the add-on eBooks used this feature and I haven't used it in my own. Keeping topic files small is a far better mechanism.

Now, an eBook viewer like Mathcad 15 has would be wonderful (it "jumps" to different documents in stead of opening new document tabs and leaving them all open), but this is certainly a start and will save having to convert TOC pages to HTML, which was the only recourse in the past. It's a start.

Author

15-Moonstone

i guess the third time is the charm, like they say. finally got the link when i tried again today. two other days i tried nothing happened.

Author

15-Moonstone

i finally got the link and it installs fine. the what's new document says they did make some improvements to the plotting. i'm curious to know what people think of this release. there were a lot of complaints for many years. does prime 6 address enough of them? i don't use it enough personally to have an opinion. i like classic mathcad much better.