John Fultz

4,706 reputation

1133

bio	website	wolfram.com
	location	Chesterfield, MO
	age	41
visits	member for	1 year, 3 months
	seen	20 hours ago
stats	profile views	409

I've been with Wolfram Research in some capacity since 1993, and have worked on the Mathematica front end since 1996. While Wolfram tolerates and even occasionally encourages my appearances in user forums like this one, my words (especially the stupid ones) are my own, and I don't speak for Wolfram in an official capacity.

Fun facts: I also like games of all sorts, and I'm a competitive Scrabble® player. I've written various sorts of crossword game-related utilities (some fun, some dead ends, some serious) in Mathematica, and consulted briefly on Wolfram|Alpha's word game content. I also contributed UI code to an open source crossword game simulator called Quackle which is quite the thing in the competitive player community.

	4,706 reputation	bio	website	wolfram.com	visits	member for	1 year, 3 months
1133 badges		location	Chesterfield, MO		seen	20 hours ago

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Nov 2	awarded	Nice Answer
Oct 25	comment	How can I set an image to be the Notebook's background? The closest I can think of is a scrollable `Pane` on top of a background, which isn't very good. Note that this will be possible in v9, but not documented (see the chat log in the Mathematica chat room for evening, Oct. 21, where I discuss why that's the case). When v9 ships, I'll swing back around and answer this question.
Oct 25	comment	Can the banner in the Home Edition be removed? Where inheritance is concerned, all things may be permissible, but not all things are advisable. At WTC 2012, a user reported broken behavior in the v9 beta to me. I spent 25 minutes banging on his system until I found `WindowFrame->"Generic"` set on `$FrontEnd`. I thought "why would anyone ever do that?". And considered that it was one of those unfortunate accidents which can have bad consequences (setting `Editable->False` globally could be bad, too). And then I read this. So, for v9, all things aren't permissible anymore. This setting will not work (and neither will `Editable`, et. al.).
Oct 25	answered	How to make the docked cell and the navigation toolbar in the Slide Show?
Oct 25	comment	Better Autocompelete for the Front-End The FE does completion by calling the kernel function FE``FC. Which is a very simple and naive function. Rewriting it could be the basis for an answer here. That having been said, this is radically revamped in v9 (coming soon!), and I wouldn't recommend any answer based upon this notion be applied to v9.
Oct 25	comment	Parsing subscripts when loading package files via the FrontEnd This just isn't supported in the FE. The FE tries very hard not to put unreadable typesetting markup into packages to facilitate easy exchange with other programming editors. Possibly workarounds...putting the code in a notebook with an auto-save package would work, but then the package file is no longer the primary source file, and that probably won't satisfy you. You could post-process the save file, but that seems dicey to me.
Oct 23	comment	Wrapping EventHandler by Table It's difficult to say what the bigger problem is that Alexei is trying to solve. But it does smell like a problem that might be more suitably handled by `Toggler` and friends than `EventHandler`, as István might be suggesting by his linked content. That having been said, I think Mr.Wizard points to a better method for tracking a variable number of values.
Oct 23	comment	Reading Early Version Notebooks Two things to try. First, see if renaming it to `.ma` works around the problem. Second, check to see if you're running 8.0.4. You say that CDF Player fixed it...but CDF Player and the Mathematica FE are basically the same program. However, you may have been running different versions, and maybe your version of Player is more recent.
Oct 23	comment	What is the complete list of valid FrontEnd Packet types? Your answer is fine. And...the list that command returns is exhaustive.
Oct 22	revised	What is the complete list of valid FrontEnd Packet types? add undocumented tag
Oct 22	awarded	Nice Answer
Oct 22	comment	Difference in integral character heights @user745434 Yeah, in addition to limits, `ScriptLevel` also affects the positioning of Subsuperscript, such as you see in definite integrals, and Underoverscript, such as you see in sums and products.
Oct 22	awarded	Talkative
Oct 21	comment	How can I get the unchanged Box form of an arbitrary expression? @Mr.Wizard, `FrontEndExecute` is implemented in terms of MathLink`CallFrontEnd, so the kernel definitions are functionally equivalent. I have reasons for preferring MathLink`CallFrontEnd, but they're quirky, and most people probably wouldn't find them relevant. I can't take credit for the name...I think Jason Harris came up with it.
Oct 21	comment	Difference in integral character heights This is probably a bug, although I haven't done the due diligence to determine exactly what's going on (and, honestly, I probably won't for a while...sorry).
Oct 21	awarded	Analytical
Oct 21	awarded	Nice Answer
Oct 21	answered	Difference in integral character heights
Oct 21	comment	Difference in integral character heights I can reproduce this under MacOSX, 8.0.4.
Oct 21	comment	Tokenize Mathematica input in a simple way Well, if you're going to steal from "the Futz" (my new nickname?), you could at least tighten up the code. Instead of the `DeleteCases` you have, how about `Cases[#,_String,Infinity]&`? And...the question was specified (in boldface, even) as wanting whitespace not to be stripped. In which case the second argument to `UndocumentedTestFEParserPacket` should be `False`, not `True`.