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Best practices for Wolfram technologies authors

As part of my role at Wolfram, I field a lot of questions about publishing guidelines and best practices. Since each author’s project is unique, the answers tend to start with “It depends,” and often involve sharing similar examples. So this post is intended to kindle a conversation between authors who have used or are interested in using Wolfram technologies in their books.

To our veteran authors and readers, please share what formatting approaches you try to emulate or think are well produced, or what specific Wolfram technology-based books you think best demonstrate good content presentation style.

If you have worked on print or e-publications, what methods for incorporating Wolfram technologies have you found to be most effective?

We hope to see this become a productive and engaging discussion in which Wolfram folk will participate as much as possible, particularly to answer questions and provide advice and resources as needed.

11 Replies

Hello everyone, since so many of you have reached out to me asking for the publishing guidelines for Wolfram Language and Mathematica I'm just going to post them here for your convenience.

For Wolfram Mathematica and the Wolfram Language: Use of the Mathematica name should be accompanied by the appropriate copyright indicators outlined below. If there is intent or interest in using the Mathematica spikey, other logo elements, or screenshots, then we do usually request to see a sample artwork proof and how it will be displayed, to ensure that it is consistent with our policies. If the spikey or other logo is used, they may also need to be added to the copyright statement on the inside copyright page. Specifically:

1) When present on the book cover (and at any first usage in the text inside the book), Mathematica should be cited by its full product name of "Wolfram Mathematica", and given the registered trademark symbol.

2)When writing a book that incorporates Wolfram Mathematica, Mathematica refers to the product, program or application but when referring to the language and/or code, function name, or other programming-based features the term Wolfram Language should be used.

3) Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica are registered trademarks of Wolfram Research, Inc., and Wolfram Language is a trademark of Wolfram Research, Inc. This should be indicated in a copyright statement to be included on the copyright page of the book frontmatter. The simplest acceptable wording would be the following: "Wolfram Mathematica(R) is registered trademark of Wolfram Research, Inc."

4) The Mathematica Spikey logo is a registered trademark of Wolfram Research, Inc.

5) The Mathematica software design, "look and feel", display, and other graphic elements are copyright Wolfram Research, Inc. (for books with Mathematica screenshot images and/or trials included)

POSTED BY: Larry Adelston

I didn't know about the limit position option. Much appreciated.

POSTED BY: Michael McCain
Posted 10 years ago

Hi Michael,

an idea that may be sufficient is to select the inline cell, then Cell > Convert To > StandardForm Display / TraditionalForm Display. As far as I can tell it is still not exactly the looks of an Output cell, but maybe closer to what you would like to see. A drastic approach would be to simply rasterize the output into an image, then put the image in place:

Defer@Sum[f, {i, 1, n}] // TraditionalForm // Rasterize[#, ImageSize -> 200] &

Of course a lot of fiddling around with the size of the image may then be necessary, and it probably does not react well to any change in magnification.

Hope this can help, Peter

POSTED BY: Peter Fleck
POSTED BY: Michael McCain
POSTED BY: Andre Kuzniarek

That did it! Wow... I was way overthinking this. And thanks for the tip... I will build the font into my stylesheet.

POSTED BY: Michael McCain

Well, I am one of those involved with print media (yes, there are still a few of us left). I have been involved in numerious book projects over the past two decades as an author, co-author, page designer, and compositor. In the early 1990s I started with TeX, using Mathematica as my development environment and either writing directly in LaTeX or converting my notebooks to .tex files. Sometime after the release of Mathematica 3 (1996) though, I switched to using Mathematica to output files that could be sent directly to a production printing device. And I continue to use Mathematica for these tasks, including my current book projects, one of which I hope will be out later this year.

Primarily I now create stylesheets to my own or to other's design and output to PDF as per my publisher's specs. Mostly, the process runs smoothly and I have been able to send my PDF to my publisher with very little if any modification. But of course every system has issues and Mathematica is no exception. Although I have implemented lots of tools and tricks over the years to help me author books and papers, I am always running into things here and there that I just don't know how to do or that are lacking in Mathematica. This is where I think this group can be a great help. People who have experience with various aspects of authoring and publishing are the ones that I have been able to get help from over the years. And conversely, I have fielded lots of questions from others who had questions that I have been able to answer. So I am very encouraged that this forum can be so useful for all of us.

There are some common threads that anyone who has used Mathematica to author or publish will recognize. I list a few here to get some discussion going:

  • creating and using running heads
  • setting up auto-numbering of chapters, sections, exercises
  • creating table of contents, indexes, bibliographies: creation and integration with project
  • use of non-standard fonts (OpenType, e.g.)
  • issues related to PDF or PostScript creation suitable for publishing
  • creation and inclusion of figures and tables;
  • electronic versions of notebooks? CDF, PDF, XML,...
  • source/version control

I am happy to share my experiences in these and related tasks with anyone here. I certainly don't profess to have the answers to all of these things. In fact, I have lots of questions myself that I hope some of you can answer! I'll start posting those over the next few days.

POSTED BY: Paul Wellin

Hi Paul,

I have a formatting question. I have created some authoring tools for myself for lectures. I have created code following in the footsteps of Eric Schulz in this video here. It's taken be awhile to work through it, but I now have most of the tools I need to create my lectures and modify the format using a stylesheet in an effective and efficient way.

However, I do have a question regarding auto numbering. I've managed to create a palette that prints out '"Example" + (number)'. It works perfectly. Here it is...

ActionMenu["Boxes", {
  "Example" :> {SelectionMove[InputNotebook[], After, Cell],
    NotebookWrite[InputNotebook[],
     Cell[
      TextData[{StyleBox["Example ", "ExampleFont"], 
        StyleBox[CounterBox["ItemNumbered"], "ExampleFont"], "\t", 
        StyleBox["Title", FontWeight -> "Bold"], "\nContent"}], 
      "Example"], After],
    SelectionMove[InputNotebook[], Previous, Cell],
    SelectionMove[InputNotebook[], Before, CellContents],
    SelectionMove[InputNotebook[], Next, Word, 2],
    SelectionMove[InputNotebook[], All, Word]}}, 
 ImageSize -> Full]

It uses the numbering I created in my stylesheet. My only concern is that if I change my palette code above to something else like "Example" + (number)+ (some text)' then I'll have to go back and change every notebook to include the extra 'some text'. In other words I have to decide right now what all of my Example cells are going to look like. I'm wondering if there is a way to create a stylesheet that includes the text '"Example" + (number)'. Then if I wanted to make changes later on down the road I can just change this part of the stylesheet. In other words... can stylesheets be used to include actual text as well as styles?

I hope I made this clear. I am a fairly new, so I apologize if this is a dumb question. I do learn quick though. : )

Mike

Btw... I am very much enjoying your book Paul. I was the one that spoke with you about using 10.1 with your Mathematica book. You very quickly updated your resources to your book to include compatibility with 10.1. Thank you!

POSTED BY: Michael McCain
POSTED BY: Paul Wellin

This is exactly what I was looking for. I've been stuck on this for quite some time. I appreciate it. Thank you Paul!

POSTED BY: Michael McCain
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