I was surprised to see Geoff's comments about Scientific Notebook
limitations. I don't have any vested interest in Scientific Notebook
other than I believe it to be the most comprehensive tool available with
the most friendly interface for learning and doing mathematics.
Scientific Notebook has many excellent features, including word
processing with the most cleanly integrated equation editor available.
It also has many general word processing features, but being a TeX based
system, has some unique characteristics. For example, the process for
changing text properties (size; font; attributes of Bold; Italic etc) is
somewhat different than with the big three (Word; Word Pro and Word
Imperfect). But "different" isn't necessarily bad!
Geoff's comments about fonts and math font size are not correct
information. In fact it is very simple to create documents with any
font and of any size and color and other attribute - including the
math. (Geoff, I suggest you explore the "Tag" menu item....)
Geoff also indicated that you cannot copy Scientific Notebook graphs to
the clipboard. That too is not correct! I routinely copy such graphs
and paste them into AutoCad so I can annotate them (an annotation
utility in Scientific Notebook is on my wish list for the next
version). I also paste Scientific Notebook graphs into Lotus Word Pro
and into Microsoft Paint. Perhaps Geoff's problem is that in some
applications you need to use "Paste Special" rather than just
"Paste"... You can also generate a "snapshot" of any Scientific
Notebook graph, which saves the graph as a WMF (Windows MetaFile).
Until Scientific Notebook was released, Derive was my Computer Algebra
System of choice, but the many features and student useability of
Scientific Notebook make it a package worth exploring.
Geoff if you have some specific questions about Scientific Notebook,
feel free to reply directly to me (rather than to the listserv) and I'll
try to help. You can also pose questions to the Web based Scientific
Notebook Discussion forums. You can link to the Discussion Forums from
the main Scientific Notebook site at:
http://scinotebook.tcisoft.com/scinotebook/default.htm
Gary Helmer
Geoff Hagopian wrote:
> My experience with Scientific Notebook has not been great. I find it
> to be slow and awkward compared to Derive - and the
> graphs don't transfer to the clipboard. Only one font size can be
> used in any document with the result that if the text font
> is a reasonable size then the math font is usually way too small (an
> annoying drawback inherited from HTML.)
>
> I had hopes for it at first and I'm still interested in seeing if
> anyone has made its on-line test generator work. Does
> anyone know of a site illustrating that function?
>
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