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Sharing Mathematica notebooks with non-Mathematica colleagues?

Paul Nielan
Posted 6 years ago

What is your best recommendation for sharing Mathematica notebooks with non-Mathematica colleagues?

  1. Printing to pdf often cuts off graphics and they are only partially contained in the file.

  2. Latex export for a notebook produces a mess. Sometimes I see 1000s of nested Holds.

  3. Sharing the nb directly and asking the colleague to download and install Wolfram Player. There is little documentation for Player from the user perspective. It appears unprofessional The differences between Player Pro and Player are not documented, so the benefits of the upgrade are unknown to the colleague and me. The cost of the upgrade is also hard to find out. Finally, if I use a private style sheet in a Mathematica notebook, Player is confused and has no way to specify to default style sheet, instead showing a mess.

  4. With regard to 3. The CDF format appears to be deprecated (legacy) by Wolfram. But much of the documentation still refers to CDF Player. This confuses colleagues.

  5. S. Wolfram talks about the computational essay, but more how-to documentation is required.

  6. The cloud is not the answer when one wants to share Mathematica notebooks within a company and protect proprietary information.
POSTED BY: Paul Nielan
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POSTED BY: Rolf Mertig
POSTED BY: Pedro Fonseca

For the time being I have used the cloud publish option. But anything wrapped in Manipulate, for example, takes seconds to respond. It is painful and unimpressive.

Personally I hope they figure out a way to make CDF, or something like it, work. The prospect to make dynamic and interactive documents (i.e., computational essays) is what really attracted me to the platform over other options. See Brett Victor's Explorable Explanations as an example of what I mean. I very much like Mathematica as an authoring environment, so much more than hand coding JavaScript and HTML (ugh). But you have to have a way to share. In the early days of PDF, Adobe got their PDF viewer proliferated and it ultimately caught on. I really hope the folks at Wolfram have a push to clarify how the Wolfram Viewer helps with sharing coming soon.
POSTED BY: Michael Costolo

For me and the world I live in PDF is essential. For sure CDF and cloud hosted notebooks have a place. And in some situations can be the way to go. But many of the calculation notebooks I produce are intended to be static documents and, more often than not, will form part of a larger report prepared using a host of other software tools (e.g. word processors, CAD applications, etc, etc.). Also, pretty much everyone has a PDF reader installed on their computer, tablet device and smartphone. So for them to view, use and reshare with others a PDFd notebook requires zero effort.

I totally get what WR is aiming for with CDF and cloud hosting and don’t discourage such strategies. But for the practical reasons mentioned above, I’d like to see more effort put into making the generation of report quality PDF notebooks ‘just work’ out of the box. The addition of other ‘standard’ features such as being able to change paper size and orientation at any point within a notebook would also be welcomed.
POSTED BY: Ian Williams
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 6 years ago

The "CDF Concept", if I remember, was (is) to allow streaming collaboration and cloud publishing, that is, being able to show (part of) a notebook to colleagues real time, steaming, if they are connected, even allowing remote software to connect and receive realtime cloud updates. The entire concept was not "display whole notebook to a colleague" which was considered "old fashioned". However, the new Front End does cloud publishing and web server streams and cloud publishing. I'm unsure how CDF can trump that game either. Personally, I see front end has "end user collaboration tools" but people share work in Wolfram Communities in old fashion form! And then also, while many upload CDF or view on the wolfram demonstrations site - these are not real-time. I'm at a loss as to whether CDF can achieve its goals and not be a copy of the Front End by the time it completes it.

And still, we share our work, questions and answers, not using Mathematica's built-in collaboration tools, but a silly blog website (that's moderated!) It's bound to be that way for the fore-seeable future. Who would store the contents and make it all searchable? Why do people keep coming back to blog websites to communicate if they have advanced collaboration tools?
POSTED BY: Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 6 years ago
POSTED BY: Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Anonymous User
Posted 6 years ago
POSTED BY: Anonymous User

Generating a report quality PDF From Mathematica notebooks can be challenging. And is something I wish would be addressed. Preferably before I retire ;-)
POSTED BY: Ian Williams
Mike Besso
Mike Besso
Posted 6 years ago

I have had some limited success by setting the page size Printer Settings | Page Settings.

But, that doesn't work very well if you want to print the PDFs. But it seems to work sort of OK if you don't need to print.
POSTED BY: Mike Besso

This is an important question. I wish you had started a new thread for it.

I don't know of a solution that I am 100% happy with. I either save as PDF (not print to PDF, but save as PDF!) or I use the cloud.

  1. Printing to pdf often cuts off graphics and they are only partially contained in the file.

Useful tricks:

  • Adjust the margins and make them smaller.
  • Normal size graphics are not cut off. I assume you increased their size. One trick I occasionally use is ImageSize -> Full, which makes the graphics as wide as the notebook. This makes them as big as possible without cutting anything off. Drawback: 1) doesn't play well with legends 2) if you like to make your notebooks full-screen, the graphics will be too large when viewed on-screen.

I find that in order to make this work well, I need to plan in advance. I write the notebook knowing that I'll need to convert it to PDF, and I pat attention to graphics sizes.

  1. The cloud is not the answer when one wants to share Mathematica notebooks within a company and protect proprietary information.

You can protect the notebook with a password. This is what I usually do.
POSTED BY: Szabolcs Horvát
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