Mathcad Plus 6.0/Mac
Printing and Other bugs

Printing bugs

  • When opening Mathcad by double-clicking on a Mathcad document, Mathcad forgets the printer selected in the Chooser. When double-clicking on the Mathcad application itself, the selected printer is remembered. Seems to indicate that printer information stored in documents overrides those for the application (even if there is no document-specific printer information).
  • Most of the printing problems have been fixed, but some equations still don't print right - the entire area below the text baseline does not print at all for some equations, especially if there is an error condition for that equation.
  • Printing Settings: There should be an "Are you sure?" dialog box if an action affects the entire worksheet (can be a user preference). Alternatively, one can make it act only on selected regions.
  • When selecting Courier font for equations and printing to PostScript printer (LaserWriter IIg, LW 8.4 driver), numbers appear slightly darker (not bold), while letters and assignment := and = signs are normal.
  • Mathcad allows for a trace width of "p" (p. 445 Users Guide), defined as one pixel device. However, when printing to a LaserWriter IIg (300 dpi), the resulting output is an irregular dotted line instead of a one pixel (1/300 in wide) line.
  • With a non-white background, the background color appears in patches in output document.
  • Start to print a worksheet. After the Printing dialog box appears, click on cancel (quickly).
    An "Unable to start print job" dialog box appears. In addition, it refreshes the window incorrectly, thinking it can write to the entire screen at (0,0) instead of the worksheet window. This seems to indicate that the Microsoft Foundation Class is thinking that the window being printed is maximized to full-screen (which, of course, is very different on the Mac).

Other bugs

  • Add support of aliases and data directories. This would reduce the need to Associate/Disassociate filenames and variables and reduce clutter in the main Mathcad folder.
  • I'd prefer using whatever graphics application I own to draw simple graphics and being able to maintain integrity and the vector nature of pasted PICT graphics within Mathcad.
  • The documentation should refer to new features since the last Mac version 3.1, in addition to new features since the last PC version 5.0
  • The Mathcad installer puts a lot of libraries in the (already large and confusing) Extensions folder. Since these files are Mathcad-specific, a better place to put them may be in a folder within the main Mathcad folder. Alternatively, combining all the shared libraries into a single, large library for easy identification can help reduce file clutter.
  • A coworker interested in upgrading mentioned that she would like to see rudimentary drawing tools included in Mathcad (lines, rectangles, text tools) for sketches. Something similar to Visio on PCs.
  • Many Mathcad regions tend to be related (i.e. equations and the graphs to plot said equations), and it is difficult to select a bunch of related regions and move them around without accidentally losing some regions or deleting others.
    I suggest a way to "group" related regions together. The regions would still be separate editable objects and would update each other accordingly, but would show up on screen as a grouped object, similar to the way graphics programs group separate objects. Moving/copying/cutting one object would move the others as well. One addition to the Appendices may be to group all Mathcad functions not only by alphabetical order but by topics, declaring argument and return types.
    A colleague mentioned the capability to add a user-defined integration algorithm to supplement rkadapt and other numerical methods (unfortunately, user-written external code modules are not supported in the Mac version).