typesetting equations

[mikej1980]

Is their a way to make MathCAD equations look like the way they do in textbooks? Formulas and equations are normally typeset in italics and basically look totally different to MathCAD worksheets. Maple and Mathematica can do this so I'd like to know how to do it in MathCAD.

thanks

[StuartBruff]

On 8/7/2009 4:06:40 PM, mikej1980 wrote:
== Is their a way to make MathCAD equations look like the way they do in textbooks? Formulas and equations are normally typeset in italics and basically look totally different to MathCAD worksheets. Maple and Mathematica can do this so I'd like to know how to do it in MathCAD.


Yes. Use math styles. See attached for example. Read the help.

Stuart

From a previous thread ...
For those who like to keep their fingers on the keyboard, one almost acceptable method is to redefine all of the User styles to start with a unique letter (such as A User, B User, etc), then, with the desired name selected, press Alt-o,E,B, to select the renamed Math Style 'User 2'. It can be quite quick after a bit of practice.

http://collab.mathsoft.com/read?74008,85

[mikej1980]

Why don't people seem to use that then? (just curious). You'd think even if users didn't feel the need that at least PTC would ship examples in an optimal presentation (ie. textbook like equation and formula typesetting).

Mike

[TomGutman]

Math styles are not used much for various reasons. Most people don't even notice the ability to define the attributes, and the documentation (a bit of a joke past MC11) doesn't cover it. Using multiple styles is even less common, as Mathsoft never saw fit to provide keyboard shortcuts for applying styles. That makes applying styles much to cumbersome and slow for common use. Stuart's technique helps a bit, but is still much to cumbersome.

Italics have been a source of problems too. Until recently, the bounding boxes were not properly adjusted for italics, with the result that using italics resulted in the truncation of some letters. Looked awful.
__________________
� � � � Tom Gutman

[ptc-1368288]

On 8/7/2009 5:24:36 PM, mikej1980 wrote:
>Why don't people seem to use
>that then? (just curious).
>You'd think even if users
>didn't feel the need that at
>least PTC would ship examples
>in an optimal presentation
>(ie. textbook like equation
>and formula typesetting).
>
>Mike
_____________________________

Could be that Mathsoft/PTC have never seen a math book in italics. Please, download more of those master work sheets dropping regularly in the collab. Even this public forum is TNR.

jmG

[ptc-1368288]

>Formulas and equations are normally typeset in italics <<br> __________________________

In my entire life and books, I have NEVER seen maths in italics ! "italics" in general are not readable on screen, no more decently printable on paper and not of the closest legal format. In lieu of the former "pica" legal typesetting, the TNR is largely accepted in Latin letters countries. I have never seen either a single drawing in italics. Guess how many millions [1000000's] of drawings and Engineering documents I have flipped over !

jmG

[mikej1980]

==>Formulas and equations are normally typeset in italics

What I meant of course is that *variables* in Formulas and equations are normally typeset in italics. ...not to mention user defined functions f(x) g(x) and so on.

Have you ever seen variables in italics in the millions of documents you've seen?

[ptc-1368288]

On 8/7/2009 6:01:01 PM, mikej1980 wrote:
>==>Formulas and equations are
>normally typeset in italics
>
>What I meant of course is that
>*variables* in Formulas and
>equations are normally typeset
>in italics. ...not to mention
>user defined functions f(x)
>g(x) and so on.
>
>Have you ever seen variables
>in italics in the millions of
>documents you've seen?
______________________________

No ! never seen italics.

in f(x), g(x) and so on, f, g are the algo name(s) that you can style at will.
"x" is the scalar argument that you style at will .
Maths are plain and sober, same should the work sheet(s) be.
Gyzmas and decorations don't belong to maths.
How many styles have you seen in Mathematica NoteBooks ? one style.



jmG

[ptc-1368288]

... also, for the naturally ugly parentheses,
there is the very nice looking slim style in Mathcad.

jmG

[StuartBruff]

On 8/7/2009 5:53:05 PM, jmG wrote:
== In my entire life and books, I have NEVER seen maths in italics ! "italics" in general are not readable on screen, no more decently printable on paper and not of the closest legal format. In lieu of the former "pica" legal typesetting, the TNR is largely accepted in Latin letters countries. I have never seen either a single drawing in italics. Guess how many millions [1000000's] of drawings and Engineering documents I have flipped over !

I have just looked through 20 of the books on my bookshelf, covering General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Computational Physics and Maths. *ALL* of them use italics in their maths representation - including my copy of Abramowitz & Stegun.

The IS0 31/80000 series mandate italics for quantity names.

Also see See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/pdf/sp811.pdf, page 34. (previously mentioned in thread http://collab.mathsoft.com/read?112580,12 )

Stuart

[ptc-1368288]

>The IS0 31/80000 series mandate italics for quantity names.<<br> _________________________

OK, in scalar maths of the form f(x):= erf(x)
... what is the quantity name ? Surely not f, erf [algos], surely not x [scalar]. If the independent variable(s) x is discretized, that is a quantity name, chaining the dependent variable: that is acceptable but not readable. Functions in mathematics are represented, then calculated from their two inseparable components: the algo and their argument. What does ISO 31/80000 propose for "algo", "argument" ?... what colors ? and what about color blind persons.

Interesting ... and what about "programs".

Jean

[StuartBruff]

On 8/7/2009 9:28:41 PM, jmG wrote:
>The IS0 31/80000 series mandate italics for quantity names.<<br> _________________________

OK, in scalar maths of the form f(x):= erf(x)
... what is the quantity name ? Surely not f, erf [algos], surely not x [scalar]. If the independent variable(s) x is discretized, that is a quantity name, chaining the dependent variable: that is acceptable but not readable. Functions in mathematics are represented, then calculated from their two inseparable components: the algo and their argument. What does ISO 31/80000 propose for "algo", "argument" ?... what colors ? and what about color blind persons.

Interesting ... and what about "programs".

Read the SP811 that I gave a link to, Jean. Or try obtaining the ISO documents from your local library (they're not free).

Stuart

[ValeryOchkov]

On 8/7/2009 4:06:40 PM, mikej1980 wrote:
>Is their a way to make MathCAD
>equations look like the way
>they do in textbooks? Formulas
>and equations are normally
>typeset in italics and
>basically look totally
>different to MathCAD
>worksheets.

See please the chapter 2 in my article "Formulae in scientific publications: problems and solutions":
http://twt.mpei.ac.ru/ochkov/formula/Engindex.html

Val
http://twt.mpei.ac.ru/ochkov/v_ochkov.htm

[TheodoreM.Bones]

I have over 1100 type fonts loaded in my computer and I can imitate almost any printed book type. Nowhere can I see italics in professional textbooks. Sometimes in scientific journals at the top for a reference or summary if brief.

[ptc-1368288]

On 8/8/2009 5:51:15 AM, bones7xx wrote:
>I have over 1100 type fonts
>loaded in my computer and I
>can imitate almost any printed
>book type. Nowhere can I see
>italics in professional
>textbooks. Sometimes in
>scientific journals at the top
>for a reference or summary if
>brief.
______________________________

I have never seen Newspaper in italic either. Italic corrupts the normal human eye Fourier transform 5 lines/mm� for one thing, it does not enable comfortable smoothing on the screen, and dithering on the print. No Engineering documents, drawings, standards, books ... have ever been produced before my times and during my times. At school, "industrial drawing" was by hand and of minimum quality not italic that I still have pretty nice. I reject italic in mathematical body, simply. And I have no time arguing with ISO and adepts telling them to mind their business and ignorance. All the fonts I don't want in Mathcad have been removed, including the ISO & ANSI fonts from Smartsketch.

Those who want italic, easy in Mathcad ...even white italic !

jmG

[StuartBruff]

On 8/8/2009 5:51:15 AM, bones7xx wrote:
== Nowhere can I see italics in professional textbooks. Sometimes in scientific journals at the top for a reference or summary if brief.

I have a stack of books on the handy-reference bookshelf in front of my computer - and I'm just picking them at random:

Heisenberg, Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory, 1949, Dover Press.
Gasiorowicz, Quantum Physics, 1996, Wiley
Aller, The Atmospheres of the Sun and Stars, 1963,Ronald
Kraus, Radio Astronomy, 1966, McGraw-Hill
Goldberg, Genetic Algorithms, 1989, Addison-Wesley
Penrose, The Road to Reality, 2005, Vintage
Abramowitz & Stegun, Handbook of Mathematical Functions, 1972, Dover
Woan, The Cambridge Handbook of Physics Formulas, 2003, CUP
Enns & McGuire, Introductory Guide to the Mathematical Models of Science (using Maple), 2006, Springer Science

All, I repeat All, of them consistently use italics to represent variables.

Look at the last page of the following excerpt on Quantum Gravity: http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/37330/excerpt/9780521837330_excerpt.pdf

or try http://books.google.com/books?id=BIGVrfO84lMC&pg=PP1&dq=%22robotics%22&ei=IOR9SoLLD5KgygTxqKTACg#v=onepage&q=&f=false

(again, picked at random using google)

Stuart

[IRstuff]

Lest Stuart gets accused of stacking his deck, let's add:

Applied Optics and Optical Engineering, R. Kingslake
Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain, W. Ypung

TTFN,
Eden

[ptc-1368288]

Before your time, Mathcad 8 collabs have crucified to exhaustion the crappy italic pi ! Mathsoft changed it for normal. What about the crappy: pi, i, e, dx in Mathematica.

jmG

[StuartBruff]

On 8/8/2009 6:22:35 PM, jmG wrote:
== Before your time, Mathcad 8 collabs have crucified to exhaustion the crappy italic pi ! Mathsoft changed it for normal. What about the crappy: pi, i, e, dx in Mathematica.

What about it, Jean?

Your contention is that *none* of the printed material you have seen uses italic font representation of mathematical variables. I have given counter-examples. The quality of such fonts is a different issue.

Stuart

[GuyB]

On 8/8/2009 11:10:57 PM, stuartafbruff wrote:
>What about it, Jean?
>
>Your contention is that *none* of the
>printed material you have seen uses
>italic font representation of
>mathematical variables. I have given
>counter-examples. The quality of such
>fonts is a different issue.
>
>Stuart

i'm going to stay out of this ... i'm going to stay out of this ...

oops - was that my outside voice?

- Guy

[ptc-1368288]

On 8/7/2009 4:06:40 PM, mikej1980 wrote:
>Is their a way to make MathCAD
>equations look like the way
>they do in textbooks? Formulas
>and equations are normally
>typeset in italics and
>basically look totally
>different to MathCAD
>worksheets. Maple and
>Mathematica can do this so I'd
>like to know how to do it in
>MathCAD.
>
>thanks
_______________________________

Mathcad can do all that too ! There was upon a time at the beginning of this collab, some Mathcaders flavoring all these gyzmas you are talking about, it didn't survive mostly considering the work sheet efficiency, Mathcad being essentially a Scientific package and the Engineers tool. Also the fact that copying all the gzma styles when pasting to another sheet the gyzma styles are not preserved and need be re-gyzmated !!!.
The other point is that for the closest or the same font you see in the web (in your books also), you would have to have the same !FONT ! and if that font does not install by default when installing Windows, you would have to purchase from foreign source. At this point, as a personal user: fine. But none of your work sheet would be readable by the collab community.
Of the so many 1000's work sheets I have posted in this collab, very exceptionally some have two/three styles, mostly for convenience because many work sheets are huge collections of modules. Though Mathcad is not a "publisher" it produces engineering documentation of exceptional quality and universally readable. Mathematica documentation is crappy (as it means !), the Maple italic makes me vomit, a does the Mathcad italic.

"Mathcad Power users" [Mona expression] don't use italic, but you can do all what you want if you have plenty of time to spare. Again, math font styles and italic aren't the same and might have made this thread confusing. No + to say.

Attached an example of the Mathcad crappy italic.

jmG

[PhilipOakley]

Surely Jean, it was all the units that were in
italics 😉

-------
When I read a text book I tend not to notice if the
bits are in italics. Usually it just looks 'right'.

The discussion may be confusing the aspect of
"looking right & consistent", with the common usage
of italics in prose for something special just here.

Looking at Unicode, lots of the 'special maths' text
now has its own code so doesn't need 'italics' (have
a look at all the variants of "h/H")

regards

Philip Oakley

[mikej1980]

As someone new to mathcad I thought I might find some sensible discussion here.

Try and find a math/physics text that doesn't have italicized variables. That would be a challenge. Obviously jmG has never seen LaTeX typesetting either.

So back to my follow up question: given that textbooks DO italicize by default, why isn't it the mathcad default like it is in Mathematica nad Maple (haven't used Matlab so can't comment on it but it used to have Maple symbolics engine so presumably it italicized as well). Being used to seeing italicized variables it looks awkward without it.

Mike

[StuartBruff]

On 8/10/2009 12:15:10 PM, mikej1980 wrote:
== As someone new to mathcad I thought I might find some sensible discussion here.

You usually will, but some people are rather attached to Mathcad the way it is, and have a rather individual take on what standards the rest of the world (including the standards organizations) ought to comply with.

== Try and find a math/physics text that doesn't have italicized variables. That would be a challenge. Obviously jmG has never seen LaTeX typesetting either.

Don't go there. Please.



See the following thread for a justification of the image above
http://collab.mathsoft.com/read?61275,12e#61275

== So back to my follow up question: given that textbooks DO italicize by default, why isn't it the mathcad default like it is in Mathematica nad Maple (haven't used Matlab so can't comment on it but it used to have Maple symbolics engine so presumably it italicized as well). Being used to seeing italicized variables it looks awkward without it.

I don't know why, but possibly because of appearance in earlier versions of Mathcad. However, it is easy enough to make it your default. Open the file normal.xmcd (in the application's area in the folder Templates), change the math styles to be what you want and save the template file. Next time you create a new file, it will use the settings you defined instead of the installation default (it's what I do).

Stuart

[StuartBruff]

On 8/10/2009 12:52:37 PM, stuartafbruff wrote:
>> but some people are rather attached to Mathcad the way it is,

Sorry, I meant Mathcad the way it was 😕

[ptc-1368288]

>Obviously jmG has never seen LaTeX typesetting either.<<br> _____________________________

I have seen Mathcad as soon it had the equation editor [year ?] and Latex surely near it's birthday. We were quite in those things at the time I was "Consultant". For your "book style publishing", the best is asking PTC if they can register Latex special characters. The sensible discussion is that in Mathcad what you write is executable. And up until version 11, it does work with Windows fonts. If you like so much the Mathematica fonts, easy: their fonts were subcontracted to Publicon , which Publicon was free in the public domain. Mathcad does recognize some of their symbols, that I have used inadvertently at the beginning of the collab, with the feedback "can't read".
Don't know if Publicon is free, no matter: download a trial version of Mathematica, Windows will install all the fonts, that you will have for free. Same applies to fonts and special symbols from Autocad ... etc.
I'm not so much interested in the Latex nice characters, because they have no use in Mathcad. Latex could be simply glyphes and not anything like the common fonts: B�zier points mapped, that Windows smooths specially. Your "Latex Italic" has no equivalent in Windows, for one thing and for the other, mathematical notation turn confusing very soon (example attached, think about it in your next work sheet).

jmG

[IRstuff]

"Why" is wholly different question. Maple and Mathematica have a mostly different audience and application than Mathcad. The former are both intended specifically for those that probably would publish their results.

Mathcad was always intended, I think, to be an engineering scratchpad, with symbolic capability tacked on.

Even with the new owners, the notion of documentation and provenance is mostly at the sheet level, rather than publication, per se. And certainly, PTC is not a place where mathematical publishing is a familiar millieu.

However, have you tried to set the variables style to italic Times Roman at say, 14 pts? Seems to me that what's specified in Section 10 of NIST SP-811 is implementable in Mathcad, currently.

TTFN,
Eden

[mikej1980]

>>I have seen Mathcad as soon it had the equation editor [year ?] and Latex surely near it's birthday. We were quite in those things at the time I was "Consultant". For your "book style publishing", the best is asking PTC if they can register Latex special characters. The sensible discussion is that in Mathcad what you write is executable. And up until version 11, it does work with Windows fonts. If you like so much the Mathematica fonts, easy: their fonts were subcontracted to Publicon , which Publicon was free in the public domain. Mathcad does recognize some of their symbols, that I have used inadvertently at the beginning of the collab, with the feedback "can't read".
Don't know if Publicon is free, no matter: download a trial version of Mathematica, Windows will install all the fonts, that you will have for free. Same applies to fonts and special symbols from Autocad ... etc.
I'm not so much interested in the Latex nice characters, because they have no use in Mathcad. Latex could be simply glyphes and not anything like the common fonts: B�zier points mapped, that Windows smooths specially. Your "Latex Italic" has no equivalent in Windows, for one thing and for the other, mathematical notation turn confusing very soon (example attached, think about it in your next work sheet).



Just for clarity I wasn't asking about special fonts or glyphs and cited LaTeX only as yet another example of italicized variables. Equation editor on Word would be yet another.

Anyway thanks to all who responded.

[IRstuff]

Ok, with some degree of difficulty:

Mathcad:


SP811:

TTFN,
Eden

[ValeryOchkov]

One specific Russian typesetting equations problem:


Val

http://twt.mpei.ac.ru/ochkov/v_ochkov.htm