Notes on Using the Forum

PLEASE NOTE: If you have a question about SMath Studio that isn't answered in this wiki, posting your question on the SMath forum might help you find the answer

Index

Bug Reports and Feature Request
Please Use the Forum's "Preview" Button before Posting
How to Include Pictures, Attachments, and SMath Studio Expressions in Forum Postings
Direct Files and Pictures attachments on the forum
Files and Pictures attachments on the forum with wiki - PART 1: Storing the file in the wiki
Files and Pictures attachments on the forum with wiki - PART 2: Including Them in Your Forum Posting
Copying-and-pasting an Expression from SMath Studio to the Forum

Here there are some tips for using the forum:

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Bug Reports and Feature Requests

If you want to post a bug report or a feature request:

First browse the forum some, in case the item has already been brought up. If the item has been mentioned, then you can just reply with something like, "This bug affects me too" or "This feature would help me too."
Please mention what version of SMath Studio you are using. This will prevent confusion in the following scenario:

a. A bug is reported or a feature is requested.

b. The program is updated accordingly.

c. Someone adds a reply to the forum topic, causing the topic to go to the top of the list (because topics are sorted by most recent reply date).

d. People assume the topic applies to the current program version, because they don't notice the date the topic was started; again, this problem scenario can be avoided by listing the SMath Studio application version in your posting.

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Please Use the Forum's "Preview" Button before Posting

This will help you to catch mistakes, or clarify unclear statements you make, before other people see them.

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How to Include Pictures, Attachments, and SMath Studio Expressions in Forum Postings

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Overview

Three kinds of non-text material can be included in your forum postings:

Pictures (usually screen captures)
Attachments (usually *.sm, *.smz or *.xmcd files)
SMath Studio expressions

There are two reccomended ways to attach files and images to the forum.

Directly with forum "post attachments" option (see direct attachments)

Indirectly, storing the file in the wiki (see part 1:Storing on wiki and part 2:Including in the forum)

PLEASE NOTE:

Some people have considered using 3rd-party free file-hosting services for storing forum attachments.

These services usually delete the files automatically after some time, however.

Instead, attachments to forum postings should not expire until the author of the posting deletes them and deletes any links to them.

So the Wiki is preferable for storing forum files.

SMath Studio expressions are shown directly in the posting, but are stored only in the text of your posting itself, by means of forum markup code (see Copying-and-pasting an Expression from SMath Studio to the Forum).

The following sections explain how to include these 3 kinds of non-text material in a forum posting.

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Direct Files and Pictures attachments on the forum

Follow these steps:

1. write your post

2. pick the "Attach files to this post?" option on the bottom-left corner

3. click on the "POST" button

Now you are redirect in the "Attachments" page

4. click on "Browse..." and search the file/image you want to attach (be careful because max size is 3906 kb; if the file it's too big zip it)

5. click on the "Upload" button to upload the single file in the forum

repeat these two steps for each file you want to attach

6. finally click on the "Back" button to post message and attachments

All files are added inside a box in the bottom side of your post

After posting, you can add new attachments or delete old by clicking on the "ATTACH" button on the top-left corner of your post

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Files and Pictures attachments on the forum with wiki - PART 1: Storing the file in the wiki

The difference with previous method is in how the file is included in your forum posting, not in a separate window on the bottom of the post (with dedicated downloads and views counter) but inside the message body; furthermore:

pictures are shown directly in the posting

attachments are shown as a link that a reader can click on to download them.

First, from any page of the Wiki, select the Navigation menu's File Management option, shown in this picture:

Once you select that option, you will be presented with a Wiki login page if you aren't already logged in. Logging in requires an account on the Wiki. On the login page, you will be given the option to start an account if you don't have such an account yet.

Once you are logged into the Wiki to upload a file, please first navigate to the 'forum_attach' folder, as shown:

Then, preferably, make a subfolder for your files, so that at any time later on, you can quickly tell which files are yours.

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Note:

Please be considerate of others who store files on the Wiki.

Please consider to use forum_attach/ as your folder for forum attachments and leave other folders for WIKI purposes.

Please delete your files from the Wiki once they are no longer needed on the forum. Also delete the links to these files from your forum posting, if the posting has not already been automatically 'pruned.'.

*.sm files cannot be uploaded to the Wiki directly - therefore please archive *.sm files into *.zip format instead.

Files should not have apostrophes (') in their names. If they do, then if you want to rename them, you won't be able to do so using the Wiki's File Management screens; to rename the files, you will have to delete them and re-upload them with the new names.

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Files and Pictures attachments on the forum with wiki - PART 2: Including Them in Your Forum Posting

The File Management pages of the Wiki show you the ending part of the URL you will need in order to include your file in your forum posting. For example, if you store a file called "some_file.zip" in a Wiki subfolder called "some_username" under the "forum_attach" folder, the Wiki will show you that {UP}forum_attach%2fsome_username%2fsome_file.zip is the location of the file, as follows:

(The %2f is HTML code which the Wiki uses to represent the / character.)

To convert this ending part to the full URL, change

{UP}

http://smath.info/wiki/GetFile.aspx?File=

The full URL is used with forum code to include the picture or attachment in your posting. Options for doing this are described next.

You can use the toolbar buttons, just above the forum text-entry box, to insert forum code for you. Or you can type the code by hand if you insist. The following code examples are given to help you understand how the forum code works, in case some code that you insert via the toolbar doesn't produce the result you expect.

The forum code for a hyperlink called example to make the hypothetical "some_file.zip" into an attachment would be:

[url=http://smath.info/wiki/GetFile.aspx?File=forum_attach%2fsome_username%2fsome_file.zip]example[/url]

You can change the %2f (or other similar codes you may see) to their normal representation if you want ('/' in this case - without the ' ' tick marks, of course). People's web browsers will access the file either way.

If you don't want to bother with giving your link a name, you can put just the URL in your forum posting. This will cause the forum to show the beginning and ending parts of the URL as the hyperlink text. The following entered into your forum posting:

http://smath.info/wiki/GetFile.aspx?File=forum_attach%2fsome_username%2fsome_file.zip

... will be posted as:

http://smath.info/wiki/G...sername%2fsome_file.zip

To show a picture, just put [img] and [/img] around the URL:

[img]http://smath.info/wiki/GetFile.aspx?File=forum_attach%2fsome_username%2fsome_picture.jpg[/img]

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Copying-and-pasting an Expression from SMath Studio to the Forum

Through the clipboard you can share any individual math expression from the SMath Studio application by using the MATH forum tag. (You cannot copy multiple expressions at one time, but you can include multiple expressions in your forum posting by copying them one at a time and using a separate MATH tag for each.) Please take a look at the screenshots below.

First, here's how you select the MATH tag in the forum's postings editor:

Figure 1: Using MATH tag of the SMath Studio forum.

Now let's discuss copying the expression itself from SMath Studio.

To select the expression in SMath Studio for copying, you canNOT just drag a selection rectangle over the expression as though you were going to move the expression on the page:

Figure 2: Wrong selection method for pasting an expression into forum.

Instead, first click anywhere in the expression, to open the expression for editing:

Figure 3: The first step in selecting an expression for copy-and-paste.

Then, within the selection rectangle that appeared around the expression, drag the mouse pointer over the expression so that the part you want is highlighted:

Figure 4: The second step in selecting an expression for copy-and-paste.

Next, copy-and-paste into the forum's text-entry box, as shown:

Figure 5: Copying an expression to the forum via standard system clipboard.

Note: Each time someone views your forum posting, the expression is converted from text format to picture format by a Web service that's hosted on the smath.info website. This Web service interprets the character ';' as a function arguments delimiter and ',' as a decimal symbol. If your locale settings are different than these, then the text formatting that is produced when you copy the expression from your SMath Studio will be incompatible with the mentioned Web service. You can easily avoid this problem, as described next.

For example, if your locale settings use the ',' character for function arguments and '.' as the decimal symbol, you might have something like the following in an SMath Studio worksheet:

Figure 6: Expressions as-localized in SMath Studio.

Pasting the "if" into the forum produces the following:

Figure 7: Expression pasted into forum per locale of author of posting.

... which then appears on the forum as follows:

Figure 8: Expression rendered per locale of smath.info.

To avoid this, once the text is pasted into the forum, manually change the function arguments delimiters to ';' and the decimal symbols to ',':

Figure 9: Expression edited for locale.

This produces:

Figure 10: Expression successfully shown in forum.

Much better!

Forum has been improved in this way, regarding copy/paste from SMath into the math tag. There are math tags lang=eng and lang=rus now and expression pasted with locale settings using the ',' character for function arguments and '.' as the decimal symbol just need lang=eng. For example:

Figure 11: Expression pasted into forum per locale of author of posting.

will be presented as expected.

Figure 12: Expression successfully shown in forum.

Without lang=* then lang=rus is considered and ';' and ',' are used as argument separator and decimal symbol respectively.