Wolfram Mathematica

9:36 AM

@acl When was that question last edited? According to the time stamp the OP removed the "adding a random number" bit 18 hours ago but all answers referring to that part of the original question are posted later.

This sounds like a cushy job: "SENIOR CAE ENGINEER M/F SEAT COMFORT"

acl

@Heike well, all except mine :) (I admit I thought the others had also answered before the change)

@Heike (no actually he added the random number thing). anyway not a big deal

@acl Oh, I misinterpreted the colour coding on the revisions page.

Q: Formatting support for \[LeftDoubleBracket] and \[RightDoubleBracket]

10:27 AM

I see that no one has voted for this request; is it an unpopular idea?

0

It has become common practice on Mathematica.SE to us the Unicode characters for a number of Mathematica symbols. This works because these are correctly interpreted when copied and pasted into a Notebook. Mathematica provides double-bracket characters for Part application. These can greatly im...

feature-request design

@acl magic spell applied

Stack Exchange

11:23 AM

-1

Q: Do we need the tag wiki Excerpts to start with "Questions relating to . . ."

Looking at the tags page we see that the majority of the Excerpts start with something like: Questions relating to Questions about Questions on Questions dealing with For questions specific to et cetera. Is this necessary or beneficial? It seems to me that this could be left off of most Ex...

discussion tags tag-wiki

11:43 AM

@MrWizard I wouldn't support changes to MMA.SE on account of this. AFAICT, it's basically Mathematica's bug for recognising the CJK block symbols correctly but not the math block ones. Instead I would suggest editing your UnicodeFontMapping.tr so that U+27E6 and U+27E7 are recognised correctly as \[LeftDoubleBracket] and \[RightDoubleBracket].

12:08 PM

@OleksandrR Unfortunately that would only fix it for me or anyone else making that modification. Further, while it would be great if this problem were corrected in Version 9 it will not provide backward compatibility, so the problem will remain. As I see it only a fix of the kind I described will allow both proper formatting and copy&paste for all users.

@MrWizard It's funny you mention vertical alignment in that question. On my system the line with U+301A and U+301B is much nicer aligned on my system than the one with U+27E6 and U+27E7.

@MrWizard I agree with your assessment, but unfortunately the fact is that CJK symbols should never have been used as mathematical operators in the first place. If we can't fix this mistake at the source, I think we have to just live with it--I certainly wouldn't advocate propagating this bug elsewhere.

@Heike I guess it must be font-dependent. Perhaps it is simply not practical to use these symbols here. That is a shame, really, and their use greatly improves the legibility of some code.

@OleksandrR "I certainly wouldn't advocate propagating this bug elsewhere." -- do you see my proposed fix as doing this, and if so, how?

12:25 PM

@MrWizard well, at the very least it would make the spacing of CJK characters wrong on StackExchange sites (unless the SE people could make it specific to our site, and even then, we have some users with CJK usernames). As for characters displaying differently than they're copied, I think we are simply spoiled with Mathematica--there is no InterpretationBox here, so probably it has to be fixed using javascripts that would intercept the "copy" operation from the browser

and then regex the characters into the right forms. I suspect this would be rather brittle.

Okay, let me ask this: how horrendous ;-) is the appearance of the CJK brackets? Would their use improve legibility even with the extraneous spacing?

@MrWizard IMO, yes. The inconsistent alignment is not that much of a problem to me.

@MrWizard How do you get Mathematica to copy double brackets as [LeftDoubleBracket] and [RightDoubleBracket] anyway?

A: How to "Copy as Unicode" from a Notebook?

@Heike Until WRI includes the feature or someone posts a better method, this:

1

Since a native method is not forthcoming, I shall post my file based circumvention, for Windows. You will need to have this utility in the command path (it apparently is stock with Windows 7). copyUnicode[expr_] := Run["clip <", Export["$Clipboard.temp", ToString[expr, InputForm], ...

Would each of you take a screen capture of my Meta post and show me what the CJK characters look like on your system?

@MrWizard Oh, ok.

12:33 PM

I really hope someone will add "Copy as Unicode" -- it's desperately needed.