Ways to work around Mathematica Notation bug?

Question

Mathematica offers the Notation package to define custom notation, and it seems to work great until I save a notebook with custom notation as a package and try to use Needs["..."] to import the new notation. As documented on the Mathematica mailing list, this causes bizarre syntax errors when evaluating any call to Notation[]. The suggested solution is to manually open the notation notebook and evaluate it into the kernel, but this is a pain for files that I plan on distributing. If anyone has a better workaround for the problem, I'd really appreciate the help!

Answer 1

I think your problem lies in the way Mathematica treats Notation[], quote:

When defining your own notations it is critically important to use the notation templates. The reason for this restriction is that the templates pasted into a notebook contain essential tag boxes embedded in the correct way.

It may not be possible at all to have a package file call Notation[], but there is a suggestion of using ParsedBoxWrapper which I didn't have time to play around with right now.

There is a kludgy solution to your problem, which is that you put all the Notation[] assignments into one cell of the Notebook and make it an initialization cell (right click on the cell edge --> Initalization Cell). This will incidentally also create a .m file with just the contents of that cell (but this file will, alas, not work with Needs[] or <<). After that you can collapse the cell, make it uneditable, unevaluatable, and hey presto! Almost like what you want.

I should note that from a distribution point of view this kludge is rather nice since the .m file gets regenerated every time you load the main file so you don't need to ship multiple files. The only downside is a slightly ugly Notebook (i.e. one hidden cell), and a pop up asking whether you want to evaluate the initialization cells of the Notebook whenever you first evaluate something in that Notebook.