some comments/requests for the notebook
Alex Ghitza
Dear sage-devel,
I will admit that I am a command-line-interface kind of person;
however, I sometimes use the notebook when I'm showing examples to a
(say calculus) class, or when I give a talk. And I'm really happy the
notebook is there and people are working hard to improve it.
Getting to the point: I spent some time with the notebook (in
sage-4.2) this week, and in the process I have accumulated a few
comments and requests. I'm posting these here so they don't get lost.
They are in random order.
1. docstrings and source introspection: typing "blah?" gives a nicely
typeset docstring of "blah". Typing "blah??" give an "ugly"
docstring and a nicely typeset source code.
Question: would it be possible to make "blah??" show the nicely
typeset verion of the docstring?
2. if a tab-completion returns a lot of possibilities, they seem to
get cut off after a while
(concrete example:
G = graphs.HouseGraph()
G.<TAB>
)
is this a bug or a feature?
3. long worksheet titles get cut off even if there would be enough
room to display them in their entirety (in my case, I had "Victorian
Algebra Conference 2009" which appeared as "Victorian Algebra
Conference 2...")
4. in the upper left corner of the worksheet, there is the Sage logo
and the version, and just to the right of this it says "The Sage
Notebook". Both of these items have the same hyperlink attached,
namely nb.sagemath.org. Would it be a good idea to have the Sage logo
hyperlink to sagemath.org, and leave "The Sage Notebook" linked to
nb.sagemath.org?
5. try entering
type(SL(2, 7))
there's something broken at the end of the output
6. this comes up in the previous example, but I believe it's more
general: output appears to get wrapped around independently of the
amount of screen real estate. is there a way to fix it?
7. I like the way list output comes up somewhat structured in the
command-line interface:
sage: G = SymmetricGroup(4)
sage: G.normal_subgroups()
[Permutation Group with generators [()],
Permutation Group with generators [(1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)],
Permutation Group with generators [(2,4,3), (1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)],
Permutation Group with generators [(1,2), (1,2,3,4)]]
In the notebook, this is much harder to parse by a human:
[Permutation Group with generators [()], Permutation Group with
generators [(1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators
[(2,4,3), (1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators
[(1,2), (1,2,3,4)]]
8. I don't have an example at hand at the moment, but maybe this rings
a bell: once in a while, when I go through a fairly long worksheet and
evaluate cells one by one, I get thrown all the way to the end of the
worksheet. This is not a huge deal, but it's a bit disconcerting if
you're giving a talk and have to constantly scroll back to where you
were supposed to be.
9. The linear nature of the notebook worksheet clashes a bit with my
idea of "slides". I tried to remedy this by inserting blank text
paragraphs as breaks between "slides", but this is not perfect.
Would it be possible to insert some sort of marker saying "this is the
beginning of the next slide", together with keyboard shortcuts for
jumping to the next/previous slide? That would make my life easier
when preparing a talk, and the final result would look more
professional.
I think that's it. Thanks again to everyone who's been working on the
notebook, and I hope this feedback is of some value.
Best,
Alex
--
Alex Ghitza -- Lecturer in Mathematics -- The University of Melbourne
-- Australia -- http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~aghitza/
William Stein
>
>
> Dear sage-devel,
>
> I will admit that I am a command-line-interface kind of person;
> however, I sometimes use the notebook when I'm showing examples to a
> (say calculus) class, or when I give a talk. And I'm really happy the
> notebook is there and people are working hard to improve it.
>
> Getting to the point: I spent some time with the notebook (in
> sage-4.2) this week, and in the process I have accumulated a few
> comments and requests. I'm posting these here so they don't get lost.
> They are in random order.
>
> 1. docstrings and source introspection: typing "blah?" gives a nicely
> typeset docstring of "blah". Typing "blah??" give an "ugly"
> docstring and a nicely typeset source code.
> Question: would it be possible to make "blah??" show the nicely
> typeset verion of the docstring?
It's possible.
>
> 2. if a tab-completion returns a lot of possibilities, they seem to
> get cut off after a while
> (concrete example:
> G = graphs.HouseGraph()
> G.<TAB>
> )
> is this a bug or a feature?
It's a bug that has been fixed and will appear in the next version of Sage.
>
> 3. long worksheet titles get cut off even if there would be enough
> room to display them in their entirety (in my case, I had "Victorian
> Algebra Conference 2009" which appeared as "Victorian Algebra
> Conference 2...")
True. It is tricky because fonts are proportionally spaced.
> 4. in the upper left corner of the worksheet, there is the Sage logo
> and the version, and just to the right of this it says "The Sage
> Notebook". Both of these items have the same hyperlink attached,
> namely nb.sagemath.org. Would it be a good idea to have the Sage logo
> hyperlink to sagemath.org, and leave "The Sage Notebook" linked to
> nb.sagemath.org?
Yes, that's possible.
>
> 5. try entering
> type(SL(2, 7))
> there's something broken at the end of the output
>
> 6. this comes up in the previous example, but I believe it's more
> general: output appears to get wrapped around independently of the
> amount of screen real estate. is there a way to fix it?
No. But if you click on the left edge of output you can toggle
whether or not it is word wrapped.
> 7. I like the way list output comes up somewhat structured in the
> command-line interface:
>
> sage: G = SymmetricGroup(4)
> sage: G.normal_subgroups()
>
> [Permutation Group with generators [()],
> Permutation Group with generators [(1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)],
> Permutation Group with generators [(2,4,3), (1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)],
> Permutation Group with generators [(1,2), (1,2,3,4)]]
>
> In the notebook, this is much harder to parse by a human:
>
> [Permutation Group with generators [()], Permutation Group with
> generators [(1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators
> [(2,4,3), (1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators
> [(1,2), (1,2,3,4)]]
I've have no clue why it would be different.
> 8. I don't have an example at hand at the moment, but maybe this rings
> a bell: once in a while, when I go through a fairly long worksheet and
> evaluate cells one by one, I get thrown all the way to the end of the
> worksheet. This is not a huge deal, but it's a bit disconcerting if
> you're giving a talk and have to constantly scroll back to where you
> were supposed to be.
That sounds like a bug involving the internal state of the web
browser's list of cell id's.
> 9. The linear nature of the notebook worksheet clashes a bit with my
> idea of "slides". I tried to remedy this by inserting blank text
> paragraphs as breaks between "slides", but this is not perfect.
> Would it be possible to insert some sort of marker saying "this is the
> beginning of the next slide", together with keyboard shortcuts for
> jumping to the next/previous slide? That would make my life easier
> when preparing a talk, and the final result would look more
> professional.
>
I implemented a genuine slide show mode this summer. It took a lot of
work. But it wasn't 100% perfect, so didn't get into Sage and
massively bit rotted. Hopefully I'll have time to update it.
> I think that's it. Thanks again to everyone who's been working on the
> notebook, and I hope this feedback is of some value.
>
Thanks! By the way, there is a sage-notebook Google group, which I've
cc'd this message to.
William
Jason Grout
>> 3. long worksheet titles get cut off even if there would be enough
>> room to display them in their entirety (in my case, I had "Victorian
>> Algebra Conference 2009" which appeared as "Victorian Algebra
>> Conference 2...")
>
> True. It is tricky because fonts are proportionally spaced.
>
Why does that make it tricky? Make the div/table cell the maximum width
possible (and expand as the browser window expands), and let the browser
worry about when to cut off the text by setting the CSS style to chop
off the text. I suppose we'll miss the "..."; is that the tricky part?
Jason
--
Jason Grout
William Stein
You're right, it's easy! Let's do it.
-- William
Pat LeSmithe
I'm working on a patch for