Import, Export, and Connectivity

Connection Technology

.NET/Link Technology Preview

The included .NET/Link technology preview provides full integration with Microsoft's .NET Framework. Mathematica users can load any .NET object into Mathematica and extend it. .NET/Link also provides an easy way to call any DLL or COM object from within Mathematica.

Import/Export

A number of graphic, web, and matrix file formats have been added to Mathematica 5, bringing the list of supported formats to over 40.

Example: XHTML with CSS

XHTML with CSS allows Mathematica users to preserve the look of their Mathematica notebooks much more closely when exporting them to the web. The following notebook expression creates a simple notebook in the Classroom style sheet.

This is what the notebook looks like in Mathematica.

This is the same notebook saved as an XHTML file.

If you view this file in a web browser, you should see that the look simulates the look inside Mathematica.

Example: SVG

Mathematica 5 supports export to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML. SVG can be viewed with SVG viewers and web browsers with SVG plug-ins.

This defines a red disk in Mathematica graphics.

This exports the SVG to a file ready to view with SVG viewers and web browsers with plug-ins.

Example: PNG

Mathematica 5 supports the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format, a popular bitmap format for the web.

Example: DICOM

Mathematica 5 supports the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) Standard. The DICOM Standard facilitates interoperability of medical-imaging equipment and is widely used in radiology.

This imports an image scanned using an MRI scanner.

Example: Sparse Arrays

Mathematica 5 supports import and export of files in many standard sparse array formats such as Matrix Market and Harwell-Boeing.

The new function MatrixPlot can show the structure of the nonzero elements in a sparse array.

Example: Tabular Import/Export

Many Mathematica users are processing increasingly large data sets. Import and export of tabular data has been speeded up by a factor between 10 and 100, depending on the size and structure of the data.

In Mathematica 4.2, the preceding took about 12 seconds on the same computer.