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Shortcuts for Scientific WorkPlace

The purpose of writing this post is to give a hand-over-fist short introduction for getting familiar with this fantastic friendly-interfaced Scientific Workplace in a minute. This post will be updated soon later.

Basic Scientific WorkPlace Shortcuts (press letter keystrokes while pressing Ctrl key in the mean time):

Ctrl+R  —  Square root
Ctrl+T  —  Switch between Math fonts and Regular fonts
Ctrl+I  —  Integration
Ctrl+D  —  Display of formulas
Ctrl+F  —  Fraction
Ctrl+H  —  Upper Script  (here, H stands for high)
Ctrl+L  —  Lower Script
Ctrl+alpha  —  $\alpha$  (the LaTex code for typing
$\alpha$ is \alpha , so basically typing the same symbol or character in Scientific Workplace is just to type “alpha” as well as pressing the keystroke Ctrl instead of typing the backslash \)
Ctrl+infty  —  $\infty$
Ctrl+9  —  parenthesis $( )$

……

For example, to use Scientific Workplace to write formula $\int_{1}^{\infty} f(x)dx=1$, we type as follows:

Ctrl+I  –> Ctrl+L –> 1 –> Ctrl+H –> Ctrl+infty –> f(x)dx=1

The original LaTex codes of characters or symbols can be shown by moving the mouse’s cursor to that symbol or character button on the top.

We can customize the buttons on the top in our favor by clicking “View –> Toolbars”. Choose all options including “Large Buttons” and “Show ToolTips”. Usually, the options like “History”, “Link” and “Exam” are barely used.

Other things like aligning sentences or paragraphs are similar to how we use WORD to do. Those are pretty easy for us to figure out.

Cons: The header codes set up by Scientific Workplace are bit incompatible with LaTex, so if possible, try to avoid using the Scientific Workplace to design or edit the header of your tex file. Just use some well written templates edited by WinEdt.