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How do I change the MMA-11 MMI at the most trivial level

I have just installed MMA-11 on my MacBook and the very first reactions I have, on a most trivial level, are these (and I cannot resolve them myself obviously):

[1] The dock icon has changed from a cool(-ish) spiky sphere to a Simpsons like starburst - yuk.

[2] Typing zero - 0 - in a notebook puts a centre dotted zero on the page - where did this come from?

I am looking forward to exploiting many of the new mathematics functionality but if anyone can help me clear up these early interface issues, I will be so grateful.

Best Wishes,

David

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POSTED BY: David Mackay
4 Replies
Posted 9 years ago

You can change the default font back to "Courier New" by evaluating:

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, StyleHints -> {"CodeFont" -> "Courier"}]

This option isn't recognized by previous versions of Mathematica, hence it is new in version 11.0.0. It is still undocumented.

POSTED BY: Alexey Popkov

On the Mac, the font for Input/Output is Source Code Pro -- a distinct improvement over Courier, which had been present since version 1. On my computer, at least, the new fonts are very sharp.

The other fonts -- Arial and Gill Sans -- leave a lot to be desired. Gill Sans is OK for Titles, etc., but Arial is an ugly font for display text. However, I am sure that Arial is still being used because it is available for all platforms. I'd prefer Helvetica over Arial, but would prefer a serifed font such as Garamond (Times -- the cross platform variant) is just ugly. When I make my own stylesheets, I use Optima,which is quite elegant for both text and headings, but is not generally available on Windows or Linux.

I have suggested that Wolfram adopt Knuth's Computer Modern, which would have the additional advantage of making LaTex translation easier.

As for the icon -- on the Mac, at least, there has been a 'fashion' of making slab-style icons for most apps, so at least the new icon does not stand out as being old-fastened by current taste. Taste changes, though, and perhaps the pendulum will swing back.

Sadly I am old enough to recall the need for a / to distinguish zero from 'oh' especially when filling in 80 column wide coding sheets for someone to translate into a deck of punched cards. Until MMA-11 I have not been confused between the two so I think that this is an unnecessary tweak (at least make it configurable via Preferences).

Given that we all look to MMA for its mathematical assistance rather than anything else, I guess this is all a bit mundane, but why did they do it? Can we ask for a small download patch to restore some of the MMA interface back to 10.4....

POSTED BY: David Mackay
Posted 9 years ago

The zero is the zero with slash typically used to distinguish it from the letter o. But I also don't like the new font. In Dr Wolfram's blog, it is said to be a crisper font:

enter image description here

But I don't find it so. On my computer (Win 7 x64) I find the fonts for input and output to be fuzzy, leading to eye strain. I would welcome a return to the last implementation.

enter image description here

Also, we still have fonts in which the letter I is indistinguishable from the numeral 1:

enter image description here

POSTED BY: David Keith
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