April 2025 mailing – Scientific Word Ltd.

Windows 11: A UK user Emailed us saying:

I run SWP 5.5 and I am thinking of buying a new Windows 11 machine with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip.
There is talk of some Windows apps not running in this setup. Probably SWP will run fine, but I am just checking with you in case you have heard of any problem.

We replied:

The only known issues with Scientific WorkPlace v5.5 and Windows 11 are documented/linked at Step 2 of the v5.5 installation instructions

Safe mode

[Bitlocker]

We have not heard of any problems with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip; but that does not constitute a guarantee that it will work

For reference, we once had such a problem with Acer computers. Please see our June 2009 mailing Item 1

We recommend you try to install the 30-day demo of Scientific WorkPlace on such a machine first; or alternatively, buy it subject to finding it works correctly with Scientific WorkPlace.

Point 1a above about Safe mode refers the user to our June 2016 mailing Item 6(1) first bullet, which says:

Installation: The TrueTeX installer portion of the installation will [may] be blocked, so [in which case – if the installer sits doing nothing for half an hour] do the installation in Safe mode (Windows 10; Windows 11).

One user who had the TrueTeX installation problem claims to have found another solution, writing:

I was able to install swp55 on my Windows 11 machine.
I have simply deleted the TCI fonts in Windows/Fonts and all worked well. It appears that they were conflicting with the installation of the TrueTex content under swp55.

We're still not sure about that solution. We replied:

We’re pleased your alternative approach worked, although we wonder whether you do still have the tci fonts in Windows/Fonts following the successful installation and, if not, what the consequences of that will be. Do you have access to the various special characters on the Symbol Panels toolbar in Scientific WorkPlace (View – Toolbars – Symbol Panels)?

We'll be interested to hear other people's feedback.

Permanent or 30-day: An academic from America experienced some problems installing his permanent Scientific WorkPlace v5.5 licence. Eventually he said:

The 5.5 version works fine right now. Will I have it active beyond the 30-day initial period?

We said:

Whether it will work permanently or for 30-days depends on whether you are using your permanent serial number 403-E0700-xxxxx-yyyyy-zzzzz or the 30-day serial number 418-E0700-19942-70825-23652. You can check the serial number from Help – System Features, or from the licence file c:\swp55\Licenses\license.lic (open with WordPad)

and we subsequently followed up saying:

I can’t tell you what will happen at Day 31 without seeing what your licence file says: please send us your file c:\swp55\Licenses\license.lic as an attachment.

The opening line of his licence file said

FEATURE SWP_All mackichn 5.5 19-jan-2025 uncounted \

so he was using the 30-day demo – despite owning a permanent licence. What he needed to do, therefore, was to install his permanent licence. However, he'd already used his SWP v6 serial number to install SWP version 6 on that computer, and the server would not issue a version 5.5 licence file for the same machine using the same serial number. Fortunately we were able to retrieve his original v5.5 serial number, from which we generated a permanent licence for v5.5 for him.

Three questions: A user with version 5.0 of Scientific Word was wondering about the possible benefits of upgrading. He wrote:

I am curious mostly about SciWord 6.1: What additional features. Particularly I miss:
Drawing commutative diagrams within Sci word.
Also annoying: Automatic substitutions get lost when reinstalling.

We replied giving the following information:

...a link to the new features of v6

You can not – and never could – draw commutative diagrams in Scientific Word. It is not a drawing or computation program. You can import diagrams produced with other software, using File – Import Picture

To be able to carry your Automatic substitions forward from one computer to another, please first see our February 2015 mailing Item 5. The Scientific Word v5.0 Automatic substitutions are in the Registry at
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MacKichan Software\Scientific Word\5.00\AutoRecognize
which you can right-click – Export and then install on the new computer.
Warning: Do not tinker with the Registry unless you are confident you know what you are doing.

For clarity: the final bullet point above relates to our February 2015 mailing Item 5(2).

Citations: One of our users asked for help with changing the style of the citations. We wrote:

You do that from within Scientific Word – Typeset – Options and Packages – Packages Options – natbib – Modify (see screenshot). By default it gives Author-year <snip>. Or you can have Numerical citations (with whatever shape brackets you want) or as superscript citations (with whatever shape brackets you want).
In the latter two cases, the Bibliography items get numbered.

What you can see in the screenshot referred to as 'Author-year' citations – to distinguish it from Numerical citations – could have the citations appearing as either:

Author (Year) – eg. Macauley (1963); or as

(Author Year) – eg. (Macauley, 1963)

The distinction between 1 and 2 above is achieved by putting a line in the Typeset – Preamble saying either:

\let\cite=\citet
or
\let\cite=\citep

as appropriate. You can see which way round the commands are by looking in the Preamble of our two sample documents CitationMkI (.tex document and PDF) and CitationMkII (.tex document and PDF); don't forget you'll need to run Typeset – CompilePDF – Generate a bibliography on the .tex files before clicking on Typeset – PreviewPDF.
You can even switch between the citation formats in the middle of your document by putting the appropriate \let\cite command in a TeX Field (Insert – Typeset Object – TeX Field) at the point you want the format of the citations to change.
For some background information, please also see our December 2010 mailing Item 2.

Deleted page: A relatively new user of our low-cost Annual Subscription asked a question which I can't remember ever coming up before. He wrote:

Is there any combination of keystrokes that clears all of the page's contents? I am saying this because it has happened several times that I hit some keys — and not quite recall which ones — and everything disappears from the page Doing control+Z does, or going to the clipboard, not bring this back.

It took a few minutes before realising what was happening. We replied:

In common with all Windows programs, Ctrl-A highlights everything; so if you accidentally type Ctrl-A instead of Shift-A, the next character you type will delete the original text and replace it with what you have typed.

If that happens, here are a couple of options to retrieve things:

Immediately close the document (the cross at the top right) without saving. You can then re-open your document from File – Open.

Every time you intentionally save your document, the new .tex file is created and the old .tex file is saved in the same folder as a .bak file. So – without saving your document – use File Explorer to rename the .bak file to, for example, backup.tex. You can then open backup.tex in Scientific WorkPlace and rename to, for example, [Filename]2.tex.
[Also see Item 6 below.]

He confirmed that that solved the problem.

Recovering document: A Scientific WorkPlace v4.0 user in Africa asked for help to recover a document:

I have been using the Scientific Workplace for years. Recently, my laptop crashed, and the recovery of the text files (in Scientific Workplace) could not be opened. However, I have a pdf version of the document. Is there a way to recover the text files?

We replied that:

There is not a way to recover the Scientific WorkPlace document (LaTeX files, *.tex) from the PDF output.
However, Scientific WorkPlace keeps an automatic backup (filename.bak) of the previous time you saved your document (filename.tex). If you can still access your laptop, it may be that there is the backup file of your document (filename.bak) in c:\swp40\docs\ which you can rename to, for example, filebackup.tex and then open from your newly installed Scientific WorkPlace. Be sure to keep several backups.
This is by no means guaranteed; but it is the best option you have to recover your document.

He found the .bak file and sent it to us, saying:

The file <snip> was located but Scientific Work Place couldn't open it. It did not appear as a tex file.

It was a moment's work to use File Explorer to rename it to [filebackup].tex and respond:

We then opened [filebackup].tex in Scientific WorkPlace v5.5 and produced the PDF attached; the graphics are missing as you had not sent those to us.
We trust this gets you up and running

which he confirmed it did.

Recovering licence: A colleague in IT support at a South American university wrote (in excellent English):

Many years ago, we purchased a license for Scientific WorkPlace 5.1 for one of our professors. However, his computer recently broke down, and we lost access to the license.
I recently noticed that MacKichan Software has gone out of business, but we still need to use the same software.
I would like to ask if it is possible to recover our old license or if we could purchase a new license for the same version or Scientific WorkPlace 5.5.
I appreciate any guidance you can provide.

We like to help; we wrote:

Let’s first of all see if we can help you recover your licence without it costing you anything: all you need to find is your serial number (of the form 403-E0600-xxxxx-yyyyy-zzzzz) and we can supply you with the download and v5.5 installation instructions.
For some ideas where to find your serial number, please see our August 2023 mailing Item 4 and November 2023 mailing Item 1.
[Note: for Scientific WorkPlace v5.5 the licence file is c:\swp55\Licenses\license.lic .]

He found the serial number in the previous engineer's licence records, and wrote:

I am unsure whether this serial number is still valid or useful for activation.
To test the process, I installed Scientific WorkPlace 5.5 on my computer. However, when I entered the serial number, it prompted me to register it online, but it seems that this option no longer works.
I am a bit confused about the next steps. Should I manually create a license.lic file in the directory *c:\swp55\Licenses* and include the serial number there? Or is there another procedure I should follow?

This was then easily resolved:

...just follow the v5.5 installation instructions precisely and take note of the v5.5 Installation Checklist in our January 2024 mailing Item 8.
FWIW, the only form of Registration that works is the Web option.
The test of a successful installation and Registration is around 10 or 12 lines saying “Available” at Help – System Features.

MacOS: The Mac question keeps coming up.

In December, someone Emailed from Turkey to ask:

Is it compatible with MACOS?

We Emailed back saying:

You can install Scientific WorkPlace *version 6* on versions of Mac up to MacOS 10.14. Please see our April 2024 mailing Item 6.
You can install Scientific WorkPlace *version 5.5* on a Mac only in a Windows emulator. See our January 2022 mailing Item 4.

A few days later, an academic in Italy asked a similar question:

I'd like to instal SWP on my macbok air M1 11.6 , but I cannot go on. The system stops me as soon as I try to open the installation file.
What shall I do?

We replied:

The Scientific WorkPlace Mac version only works on 32-bit Mac: that’s up to MacOS 10.14 Mojave. From MacOS 10.15 Catalina upwards, you will need to use an emulator – in which case you may as well install the more popular and straight-forward Scientific WorkPlace version 5.5 rather than version 6.
You will find these mailing items helpful: October 2024 mailing Item 6; August 2022 mailing Item 3; October 2022 mailing Item 1 and April 2024 mailing Item 6.

And in early January a professor in Canada asked:

Are the products comparable with Mac m4 running MacOs sequoia.

Upon receiving the same reply as B above, he followed up with:

Thanks for you reply. Will the Win 5.5 version will run on Mac m5 via parallel and Win 7 ( the last version )

We confirmed:

Yes, that should work.
Please try it with our free 30-day demo (3-step process: download + serial number + installation instructions).

In any case, please be sure to follow the relevant installation instructions precisely for whichever version you want to install. For the v5.5 installation checklist please see our January 2024 mailing Item 8.

Holiday Closure: We will be out of the country and not available by telephone for 10 days from Friday 16th to Monday 26th May. Normal service will be resumed on Tuesday 27th May. Our Holiday Closure page is here! But be assured we'll continue to be available to our registered users for Tech Support by Email throughout this period.