 |
Cells as Mathematica Expressions
Like other objects in Mathematica, the cells in a notebook, and in fact the whole notebook itself, are all ultimately represented as Mathematica expressions. With the standard notebook front end, you can use the command Show Expression to see the text of the Mathematica expression that corresponds to any particular cell.
| Show Expression menu item | toggle between displayed form and underlying Mathematica expression |
| Ctrl+* or Ctrl+8 (between existing cells) | put up a dialog box to allow input of a cell in Mathematica expression form |
Handling Cell expressions in the notebook front end.
| Cell[contents,"style"] | a cell with a specific style |
| Cell[contents,"style",options] | a cell with additional options specified |
| Cell[contents,"style1","style2",...,options] | a cell with several styles |
Mathematica expressions corresponding to cells in notebooks.
Within a given notebook, there is always a collection of styles that can be used to determine the appearance and behavior of cells. Typically the styles are named so as to reflect what role cells which have them will play in the notebook.
| "Title" | the title of the notebook |
| "Section" | a section heading |
| "Subsection" | a subsection heading |
| "Text" | ordinary text |
| "Input" | Mathematica input |
| "Output" | Mathematica output |
Some typical cell styles defined in notebooks.
A particular style such as 
or 
defines various settings for the options associated with a cell. You can override these settings by explicitly setting options within a specific cell.
option | default value | |
| CellFrame | False | whether to draw a frame around the cell |
| Background | Automatic | what color to draw the background for the cell |
| Editable | True | whether to allow the contents of the cell to be edited |
| TextAlignment | Left | how to align text in the cell |
| FontSize | 12 | the point size of the font for text |
| CellTags | {} | tags to be associated with the cell |
A few of the large number of possible options for cells.
The standard notebook front end for Mathematica provides several ways to change the options of a cell. In simple cases, such as changing the size or color of text, there will often be a specific menu item for the purpose. But in general you can use the Option Inspector that is built into the front end. This is typically accessed using the Option Inspector menu item in the Format menu.
| • Change settings for specific options with menus. |
| • Look at and modify all options with the Option Inspector. |
| • Edit the textual form of the expression corresponding to the cell. |
| • Change the settings for all cells with a particular style. |
Ways to manipulate cells in the front end.
Sometimes you will want just to change the options associated with a specific cell. But often you may want to change the options associated with all cells in your notebook that have a particular style. You can do this by using the Edit Stylesheet command in the front end to create a custom stylesheet associated with your notebook. Then use the controls in the stylesheet to create a cell corresponding to the style you want to change and modify the options for that cell.
| CellPrint[Cell[...]] | insert a cell into your currently selected notebook |
| CellPrint[{Cell[...],Cell[...],...}] | insert a sequence of cells into your currently selected notebook |
Inserting cells into a notebook.
CellPrint allows you to take a raw Cell expression and insert it into your current notebook. The cell created by CellPrint is grouped with the input and will be overwritten if the input is reevaluated.
