Mathcad 15
Mina Spartin
I can insert a picture from file, but when I do this a.) it seems to show smoothing/interpolation between pixel values (where does this come from - if I open the image in windows Photos app it displays 9 pixels as expected ?!) and b.) it does not update if matrix values are changed.
I am assuming that I am missing some simple method of viewing the images. There seems little point in having a nice set of image processing functions if you can't visualise the impact it has on your image at each step!!
The feature you request is available for a very long time in real mathcad (MC15 and below), but not (yet?) in Prime. Incredible, sure not understandable, but true. I guess its a feature planned for future versions of Prime.
I agree that that's unreasonable when you're actually into serious image processing.
And yes, copy and paste in either direction is another of the many issues in Prime - the quality has never been as good as it should be or as we would expect it to be.
If I insert object, 'new' and then browse for file - this gives an embedded link. It does not update automatically, but i double clicked it opens native application (usually paint for bitmaps). This then refreshes the data and updates the image in mathcad.
But BOTH methods show the image in mathcad as smoothed. But (and this is crazy), when the link opens paint to show the file, it is correct !!!. Only the 9 pixels shown in paint - but mathcad image STILL smoothed.
Maybe a crude workaround for you could be to scale up the image before saving it you you don't have to scale the inserted picture in Prime. I guess that there still would be some antialiasing but much less noticeable.
Q2: Are you representative of PTC or just a super-user? It would be good to flag this issue to PTC but I'm not sure how to. After I installed trial I got sales email to check all was good. I replied about this issue but have got zero response - again very disapointing!!
I am not quite sure if the workaround is just hiding the effect visually. It could be that the antialiasing only is done on the fly when you enlarge the picture in Prime. So when you just insert it without rescaling it afterwards, maybe no antialiasing is done. But then, I am not sure.
I agree that its undesirable to have to increase the file size that way, especially as BMP is not compressing, But then its even more annoying that changes in the matrix do not immediately result in a change of the picture. The pic is not live and dynamically as in MC15- but just static and neither connected to the saved file nor the Prime matrix and has to be inserted over and over again. A no-go.
"WRITEBMP(path,M)=" works as well as my "dummy=...", just two different ways to force "evaluation" of the WRITEBMP function. IN older Mathcad the result of the evaluation was not 0 but the matrix itself which looked ugly and was space consuming. Thats the reason I am used to rather assign the result a dummy variable.
I am not affiliated with PTC in any way other than using software which unfortunately was bought by PTC. I am not a "super-user" either but just someone who has been using MC for a very long time, so inevitably I've had quite a bit of experience with the software.
Getting in contact with the right people at PTC can be a hard way, as we could often read here in the forum. But once they have luck they usually report about a very efficient handling of their problems. So my conclusion is that PTC has competent staff but hides them efficiently
But if you are not a paying customer with an active subscription, PTC would not be interested in your opinions, feedback or bug reports. Opening a case at PTC support can only be done with an active subscription.
There is also an "ideas" section somewhere here in the forum, where users can place ideas for improvement and feature requests and other users can vote for these ideas. PTC claims that development will consider the "ideas" with the most votes for future versions. That's something you can believe, but don't necessarily have to believe.
We will have to wait and hope that we get something which is better done and not like the "improvement" of the mediocre 2D plot via a badly integrated third party tool or the implementation of the combo boxes with their limits when it comes to units.
Today's problem is the pound force. MathCAD knows the definition of the pound force, and the problem is that when I want to keep something as a pound force, it instead inserts the definition of the pound force and cancels out everything that can be cancelled out. When I try multiplying out by the unit I want, it still does the same thing.
I'm trying to use the spring constant k in my US standard formulae. Normally, k=force/distance, or lbf/ft. Since the definition of the pound-force includes feet (I think it's something like ft*lb/s^2), then MathCAD automatically cancels out the feet and leaves me with s^2/lb, which makes no sense in the context of what I'm trying to do.
Yes, Mathcad will often give you some undesirable units in the result. in-lbf is a common one for me also; it is not the mathcad default unit. However, all you have to do it type over the units it gives you with the units you desire. (It will give you those typed units plus anything else it needs to make the units work, so if it's adding additional units you've formulated something wrong.) If that doesn't work please post an example. But I use lbf and lbm all the time with no issue (Prime anyway, I assume 15 is the same)
As it turns out, I'd tried entering in the correct units and it didn't work (it added the additional undesirable bits) - until I went to do an example, just by having variables aForce and aDistance and divided them, then that worked perfectly. Changed from the s^2/lb to lbf/in
Bizarrely, MathCAD has formulated a value for force as Lb*ft/s^2 but hasn't automatically changed it to lbf. So it's possible that it's just gotten really confused with something I did earlier on, and didn't display that as a problem (I've had similar problems with torque).
The only way you can control somewhat the behaviour of mathcad's working with units, is by telling it to not use any unit system. Then you can, no, have to, define your own unit system. The downside of this is that you have to tell mathcad with most every result what the unit is you want it to be displayed in. Basically that is the same as what you can do now: without defining your own unit system, but using a built-in one, just fill the units-placeholder of a result with the unit you want in there.
Now, that I tried to open a 102-pages file on mathcad prime 5.0.0., it started lagging terribly. I was unable to edit / modify the file because of serious lags. After 5-10 seconds, the program became non-responsive.
If your 100+ pages file contains a lot of inserted pictures, you may try to delete them and see if this enables you to edit the file. After editing you can try to reinsert the pics. But I know that is by no means acceptable, not really workable, quite unreasonable and very likely to fail, too.
I first noticed this problem when I half the time I tried to calculate my sheet, and I would notice mathcad would get "stuck" trying to multiply two matrices (one of the matrices is an inverse of another which mathcad had worked out prior). Once it gets stuck it wont ever finish and I cant stop the calculation without exiting mathcad entirely. This tended to happen about half the time I tried to calculate the sheet and the other half it would work fine, without spending hardly any time on that particular calculation.
This is becoming quite frustrating as the sheets can take a long time to do the calculations let alone when I end up wasting the time because it will get stuck later on in the sheet and I have to close it and start again
The sheet is 2.4MB and the part that it tends to get stuck on at those points th matrices arent that big, only about 300x300. There are other places where there are vectors in matrices that can have 1000s of rows/columns where I havent had problems with it doing the calculations.
As Mike says, without the worksheet it is impossible to say what is really happening. Try shutting down and restarting Mathcad before loading the worksheet. That shouldn't be necessary, but as noted in the thread Mike referenced, it seems that sometimes it is.
Maybe, although without seeing the worksheet there is no way to be sure. If you have a lot of intermediate results being calculated you should either change the worksheet to get rid of them or put the intermediate calculations into a program. Even if you use the same worksheet variable name for all the intermediate results, a second assignment to the name does not overwrite the contents of the first assignment. It creates a new copy of the variable, with it's own memory requirements, and there is no way for you to free that memory. However, if you put intermediate calculations in a program, then when the program exits the memory used by local program variables is freed.
I have built a calculation sheet that is dependent on some rather large data tables. I have used the Insert > File Input method to reference these tables. This works fine for building the sheet, but once I distribute it to 100+ engineers, I feel like there will be an issue with having to lug around several data tables.
Is there a way I can integrate these tables into mathcad the same way one would with a insert > file input method, but without having to become dependent on external files? Perhaps there is a way I can integrate the data directly into my mathcad sheet?
59fb9ae87f