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Education Mathematica External Programs and Systems Interface Construction Presentation and Notebooks

W. Craig Carter, MIT

Posted 11 years ago

Hello, For two classes that I teach, I distribute dozens of mathematica notebooks as lecture material. I would like the students to be able to search through these notebooks for topics and examples. I'd like to construct a tool that is a hybrid between a search engine and an index. I am hoping that I could get advice about how to proceed. Ideas that come to mind: 1) Create a palette that opens all notebooks below a given top directory and uses front end functions such as NotebookFind[]. However, opening all notebooks seems like overkill. 2) Just create a PDF of all the notebooks and use a pdf search tool. However, this wouldn't link to the particular notebooks. 3) Extensively tag all of the cells in all of the notebooks; write some front end code to programmatically create a palette. The palette would be updated as the lectures grow. However, it is going to be a hassle to usefully tag all of the cells.

POSTED BY: W. Craig Carter

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Posted 11 years ago

One thought that comes to mind is that, if your notebooks have the relevant phrases in their Section, Subsection, and Subsubsection cells (and perhaps a small group of other cell types. Then you could create a data structure with the these cells' contents--perhaps suitably pre-processed-- along with the notebooks that they come from. This could then be placed in a user interface (which would reside in the directory structure of the notebooks) where one could type in a search phrase in an input field and then be presented with a list (with hyperlinks) of the notebooks where the search phrases are located. The data structure would be created by processing the set of notebooks, and embedded in the UI notebook which is permanently saved in the top level directory of your set of lecture notebooks. I know that this is a very vague idea, but I think it's doable...