1.5 The Control Format

Two output modes.

Instead of applying TraditionalForm to every control object individually, you can switch to displaying control objects in traditional form automatically. This can be done by issuing the command SetControlFormat[] or by simply clicking the "Control Format" button in the Control Format palette, which is available under the Palettes submenu of the File menu (see Figure 1.1). Additionally, SetControlFormat[] turns on the TraditionalForm display for all matrices and some expressions that involve control objects and matrices. You can revert to the standard Mathematica output format by issuing the command SetStandardFormat[] or by clicking the "Standard Format" button in the Control Format palette. The SetControlFormat function sets an appropriate value for the built-in global variable $PrePrint. SetStandardFormat restores the previous setting of that variable, if any.

Figure 1.1. Setting the display of control objects in TraditionalForm and matrices in MatrixForm.

In this guide we routinely use the control format, but switch to the standard one as needed to highlight the underlying standard-form representation of the object in question. As the two formats look quite different and can be easily distinguished, no notice is given in the text to identify them. If you reevaluate the online documentation and your results appear in the different format, simply switch to the appropriate format using the Control Format palette or convert the individual cell to the appropriate format using the menu choice or the corresponding keyboard shortcut.

At this point, we switch to the control format. As a result, the matrix displays in the traditional form and so does the StateSpace object.

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