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# What keys need to press to type a dot (to be interpreted as multiplication)

Anonymous User
Posted 5 months ago
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 edited to add: the keys needed to type a dot are esc-.-esc, but I still haven't found the documentation to that effect. Maybe I will write a program to record my long and frustrating travels through the Wolfram documentation.Here is how not to find the answer: Start by typing esc-d-o-t; give up on that. Now go to the front page of the Documentation Center. Search "Dot". After realizing you have made another mistake, go back to the front page of the Documentation Center. Press random links until you find yourself on "Wolfram Language Syntax". Then you see "Mathematics & Operators", in orange, and under that you see a "+' and a "*" but not dot. Another dead end, or is it, because things in orange might be hyperlink, or they might not, and you won't know unless you take a gamble and try. Click it. Nothing. Lost the gamble. 20 more minutes killed, no dot, and no math done. When I was a kid, we would just push the #2 pencil into a piece of paper, and the dot would happen.My little latex paper I'm writing has an index on the last page of all mathematical symbols used in the paper, scan the index, see a symbol, the index tells you what page the symbol is defined on, with a hyperlink to the definition....
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Posted 5 months ago
 All of which is a pretty good indication that dots will not be readily used for multiplication. One can, however, give a definition to CenterDot. CenterDot[a__]:=Times[a] Examples: In[1]:= CenterDot[a, 3, r, 5] Out[1]= 15 a r In[2]:= a\[CenterDot]3\[CenterDot]r\[CenterDot]5 Out[2]= 15 a r In StandardForm the infix variant looks much nicer of course.
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 5 months ago
 Thanks. I apologize for an accidentally misleading aspect to the title: In fact I want this only for a formula to be displayed and interpreted by the human reader, but not evaluated by Mathematica. Are there any keys I can press on my keyboard to make a center dot appear on my screen? How would a talented user find the answer in the documentation?
Posted 5 months ago
 One can do . and this can be found under Details in the CenterDot ref guide page, or by squinting at the Special Characters palette after locating and mousing over the center dot button.I would expect most users to find this more readily via the first approach (which I only thought of after going the second route).
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 5 months ago
 Thank you. I was going to ask whether there's an list of all typesetting-symbols in Mathematica? CenterDot and every other thing like it, whether it has built-in meaning or not? Then I followed the link at the bottom of the CenterDot page to an "Operators without Built-in Meanings" tutorial, but it turns out that tutorial doesn't even mention CenterDot, so that would have been another unfruitful approach to the answer (not that I had a clue how to find that tutorial in the first place, without knowing first that something called 'CenterDot' was somehow involved).
Posted 5 months ago
 See "guide/ListingOfNamedCharacters" in the documentation center.
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 5 months ago
 Thank you, that page is helpful. I wonder how I was supposed to find it from the front page of the Documentation Center.
Posted 5 months ago
 ...list of all typesetting-symbols in Mathematica... Another way to discover typesetting symbols is through the menu Palettes > Writing Assistant; then explore the Typesetting frame. There are five panes. The center-dot can be found by clicking the button with the multiplication x symbol (cross). Also, you could click on the button titled "All Special Symbols and Characters" and explore them.The tutorial guide Mathematical and Other Notation gives another.The guide Listing of Named Characters gives a list of the special characters organized alphabetically according to Mathematica's naming conventions. Not always the easiest thing to use, but good for searching when you know part of the name.
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 5 months ago
Posted 5 months ago
 I guess I lack the mental capacity to memorize unordered sets of page-addresses, You don't have to, that's what we have computers for :-) I got used to tables of contents because writers for thousands of years have been putting tables of contents first thing in books, course syllabi, and the Unix info program. Why not use the modern equivalent of a table of contents? The Wolfram Language documentation is online, and easily searchable there. The top three results for "typeset dot mathematica" should answer all the questions in the OP:https://www.google.com/search?q=typeset+dot+mathematica&oq=typeset+dot+mathematicaSpecifically, the answer to the question in the title of this post is front and center in the first result.