Changing output default to StandardForm / TraditionalForm

Questions
1

Hi All,

I problem I have all the time is my notebooks switching to TraditionalForm instead of StandardForm and being unable to switch back. The switch happens because I used FeynCalc often, and that resets the default to be TraditionalForm output.

However, TraditionalForm is just incompatible with doing actual computations so I prefer to switch back rather than manually putting StandardForm[] around everything I evaluate. However, when I open the Options window from the Format tab, I go into Cell Options > New Cell Defaults > CommonDefaultFormatTypes, when I try to change Output to StandardForm, I can never apply the change! Attached is a screen shot of what I see.

How do I get this change to be more consistent? This drives me crazy, and the guess work of kernel quitting, restarting, blah blah until finally the default resets by some magic is a terrible solution.

Thanks!

ScreenShot2023-12-18at15.31.35.png
ScreenShot2023-12-18at15.31.35.png596×504 46.4 KB

2

Hi Chis, I’m not a Mathematica expert, but try this. Type the following command into your current document:

CurrentValue[$FrontEnd,{"CommonDefaultFormatTypes"->"Output"}]=StandardForm;

His change will be applied to all documents.To restore the previous format:

CurrentValue[$FrontEnd,{"CommonDefaultFormatTypes"->"Output"}]=TraditionalForm;

Hope this helps.

3

Hi Sinval,

I’ve been having the exact same problem as Chris and this is the solution. Resetting settings to defaults didn’t help either. I saved the code above into a notebook for easy switching.

Thank you so much!

Lori

4

I have the opposite problem. I want the style “text” (ALT+7) to be in TraditionalForm in order to display math expressions correctly. However, whatever I do it switches to StandardForm: when I define DefaultFormatType->TraditionalForm in my default stylesheet for the text style or in Cell Options/New Cell Defaults/CommonDefaultFormatTypes/“Text”->TraditionalForm. Any ideas?

5

My experience with formulas in text cells is that I start an inline cell with control-(, on Mac, and the formula shows in TraditionalForm automatically.

6

Hi Ulrich,

In my case, the only thing that worked was the code mentioned above:

CurrentValue[$FrontEnd,{"CommonDefaultFormatTypes"->"Output"}]=StandardForm

Sinval

7

Yes, I know that but this is unfeasible if you have a lot of inline math. I learned that you cannot enough comment your code because otherwise in some weeks or months when you get back to it you have almost forgotten all.

It’s just one of another annoying bug of Mathematica that despite clearly telling it to display text in TraditionalForm it does just the contrary of what you want it to do…

8

CurrentValue[$FrontEnd, {“CommonDefaultFormatTypes” → “Text”}] =
TraditionalForm;
When I execute this code in a notebook, it does not put all newly created text cells (Alt+7) into TraditionalForm.

9

I’ve never used this code with text. I think I’d better do some more research.

Sinval