Logical Design Separates Content and Appearance

Scientific WorkPlace^®, Scientific Word^®, and Scientific Notebook^® are designed to increase productivity for anyone who writes technical documents, especially those containing mathematics. They are perfect for writers in all technical fields: mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry, computer science, economics, finance, statistics, medical research, operations research, logic, and more.

The approach, known as logical design, separates the creative process of writing from the mechanical process of formatting. You apply tags to text to say what the text is; the software handles the job of formatting it. Logical design leads to a more consistent and attractive document appearance because choices of fonts, spacing, emphasis, and other aspects of format are applied automatically. Separating the processes of creating and formatting a document combines the best of the online and print worlds. You concentrate on writing a correct paper; our software makes it a beautiful paper. Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word and Scientific Notebook come with predefined document shells.

Logical Design Is a New Way of Working

When you use a WYSIWYG system, you constantly give commands that affect the appearance of the content. You select text and then choose a font, a font size, or a typeface. You apply alignment commands such as center, left justify, and right justify. To center an equation, for example, you select it and choose the center alignment. In a logical system, formatting commands are replaced by commands that define the logical structure of the content instead of its appearance. Rather than center text, you create a title, a section head, or a displayed equation by applying tags to information in the document. The format of the title, the alignment of section heads, and the alignment of displayed equations are all determined separately by the properties of the tags you use. In Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Word, tag properties are determined by the document's typesetting specifications (a collection of commands that define the way the document appears when you produce it with LATEX typesetting) and by the style (a collection of commands that define the way the document appears onscreen and when you produce it without LATEX typesetting.) In Scientific Notebook, the tag properties are determined by the style only, since it does not include LATEX typesetting.

Also, WYSIWYG systems divide documents into pages according to their anticipated appearance in print. To see an entire line, you often have to scroll horizontally because the screen dimensions and page dimensions do not match. In a logical system, working with pages is unnecessary, because the division of a document into pages has no connection to the document's logical structure. Thus, on the screen Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word, andScientific Notebook break lines to fit the window. If you resize the window, the text is reshaped to fit it.

Logical Design Ensures a Beautiful Document Appearance

The emphasis on logical structure does not ignore the fact that documents must still be printed in a readable, organized, and visually pleasing format, nor does it ignore the fact that you may not always need publication-quality output. With Version 4 and later of Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Word, you can preview and print your documents in two ways. You can compile, preview, and print your documents with LATEX to obtain a high-quality, typeset appearance, or you can preview and direct print without typesetting for a near-WYSIWYG appearance. WithScientific Notebook, only direct printing is available.

Typesetting Features

In Scientific WorkPlace^® and Scientific Word^®, you can typeset your document using LATEX, the undisputed industry standard for typesetting mathematical text. LATEX provides automatic document formatting, including margins, hyphenation, kerning, ligatures, and many other elements of fine typesetting. LATEX also automatically generates document elements including the title pages, table of contents, footnotes, margin notes, headers, footers, indexes, and bibliographies. The resulting PDF file can be distributed, printed or be used to drive typesetting equipment.

Because Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Word communicate with LATEX for you, you can concentrate on what you do best–creating the content of your document–without worrying about LATEX syntax. You don't need to understand LATEX to produce beautifully typeset material, but if you do know TEX or LATEX commands, you can use them in your Scientific WorkPlace or Scientific Word documents to make the typesetting even more precise.

• Formatting variety with predefined document shells.
  Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Word come with predefined document shells, each with a different typeset appearance and most are designed to meet the formatting requirements of specific journals and academic institutions. You can choose the shell that is most appropriate for your journal or publisher. If you don't know yet where your work will be published, we recommend that you start with one of the standard LATEX shells, which can be easily adapted after your paper has been written.
• Typesetting control.
  Each document shell has a LATEX document class and may also have LATEX packages. Both the class and the packages have options and settings that create a more finely typeset appearance for your document. The available options and packages depend on the shell, but typically govern the ability to modify the formatting for typesetting details such as different paper sizes, portrait or landscape orientation, double-sided printing, double-column output, different font sizes, and draft or final output. You can change the options and packages with the Options and Packages item or with the Document Format item on the Typesetting menu.
• Easy generation of front and back matter.
  You can create a table of contents easily by inserting a command into the Front Matter section of your document. When you typeset your document, LATEX automatically generates the table of contents from the section headings you have created. Similarly, you can create an index by inserting index entries throughout your document, and letting LATEX generate the index pages. An index can have primary, secondary, and tertiary references, and can also point the reader to other entries in the index.
• Automatic numbering of theorems, lemmas, and other theorem environments.
  You can number theorems, lemmas, propositions, and conjectures in a variety of styles. You control whether they are each numbered in the same or separate sequences, so that your theorem environments might be numbered as Theorem 1, Lemma 1, Theorem 3, Conjecture 4, Lemma 5…, or as Theorem 1, Lemma 1, Theorem 2, Conjecture 1, Lemma 2…. As an option, you can reset the numbering at the beginning of each chapter or section, and you can include the chapter and section numbers in the number.
• Automatic cross-referencing.
  You can create automatically generated cross-references to equations, tables, figures, pages, and other numbered objects elsewhere in your document. You don't have to know the object or page number in advance. When you typeset, LATEX inserts the number of the referenced object in the text.
• Automatic bibliography generation.
  Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Word include BibTEX for automatic bibliographies. You select references from a BibTEX database of references, and BibTEX formats them according to the bibliography style you select. Programs and browser plugins, such as Zotero, save references in BibTEX format.

Computer Algebra Systems

A computer algebra system, or CAS, is a mathematics engine that performs the symbolic computations fundamental to algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. Recent versions of Scientific WorkPlace^® and Scientific Notebook^® (after Version 4.1 Build 2347) include the kernel to the German computer algebra system MuPAD^®.

With MuPAD 5^®, you can evaluate, factor, combine, expand, and simplify terms and expressions that contain integers, fractions, and real and complex numbers, as required in simple arithmetic and algebra. You can also evaluate integrals and derivatives, perform matrix and vector operations, find standard deviations, and perform many other more complex computations involved in calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and statistics. Additionally, you can create 2D and 3D plots of polynomials, trigonometric functions, and exponentials, and you can create and explore animated 2D and 3D plots.

Features and Capabilities of MuPAD

We have created an interface to the MuPAD kernel to make it easy to use with Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook. In addition, the system accepts input and creates output using natural mathematical notation, the basis for our scientific word processors. Performing computations in Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook is easy.

• Computational Functions.
  Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook provide a wide range of the graphic, numeric, and symbolic computational functions available with MuPAD. The programs provide ample functionality for both simple and sophisticated mathematical computations involving calculus, ODE, matrix manipulations, statistics, linear algebra, and 2D and 3D plots. Also, you can access additional functions available to MuPAD—even if they don't appear as items on the Compute menu—with the Define MuPAD Name menu item.
• Animated Plots.
  With MuPAD, you can create a variety of animated plots: animated 2D plots in polar coordinates, animated 2D and 3D plots in rectangular coordinates, animated 2D and 3D implicit plots, and animated 3D tube plots in cylindrical and spherical coordinates and vector fields. You can rotate, move, zoom in and out, and fly through 3D plots.
• User-defined Functions.
  With MuPAD, you can create user-defined functions (.mu files) with an ASCII editor, even if you don't have access to a full MuPAD installation. The files are easy to manipulate and are powerful tools for users interested in programming. Working in a Scientific WorkPlace or Scientific Notebook document, you call the function with the Define MuPAD Name command.
• Available Functions.
  While Scientific WorkPlace and Scientific Notebook provide many functions available with MuPAD, not all capabilities are included. Programming packages, certain plot types and options), and manipulation of the position of highlights and shadows in 3D plots aren't available. Scientific Notebook doesn't have 3D implicit plotting with either CAS. Additionally, some limitations exist regarding the placement of text on plots and the use of different types of plots on the same graph. Iteration and condition commands (such as if, elif, else, fi, for, while, do, and od) aren't available.

Web Publishing

When you want to publish your document on the web, you simply choose "Export to Web" on the File menu. This will save your document, any graphics files your document references, the CSS files used by your document (which govern your document's on-screen appearance), and any other necessary files to a single zip file. You can then expand the zip file on your web server.

There are several options available when you export your document.

• Since the basic set of CSS files used in our programs are built into the programs and are not changeable, you can choose to replace these by references to files on the mackichan.com website. This reduces the size of your site slightly, but means your files will not be readable without an Internet connection.
• All mathematics in the document will be represented by Math ML, which is fully supported in the Firefox browser since it is a part of the specification of HTML5. You can either require that your readers use a browser that supports MathML natively, or you can include a reference to MathJax. MathJax is a JavaScript library that enables any browser to render MathML. Doing this will make your document readable by any browser, but the rendering of mathematics will be slower than in Firefox.

It is also possible to post documents in PDF form, and users will generally be able to view them in any web browser, and follow links just as in an html file.

Spell Check

On the Windows^® platform spell checking in realtime is provided using inline spell checking from MySpell. MySpellprovides a free open-source dictionary for over 40 languages. Misspelled words have a wavy red underline.

There is also a Check Spelling dialog box where you can choose to replace a misspelled word, or to ignore the suggested corrections. You may also specify which language to use.

On the Mac^® the spellchecker uses the OS X^® dictionary.