After volunteering to write a section for the "User Manual" on the
special function package, I started thinking about how to best
present maxima examples in TeX. A few thoughts on the possibilities:
i) Use maxima ASCI-art math. This is the honest approach because
it what most users will see on the screen; however, it looks 1970-ish,
takes up too much space, and it is easily messed up (an extra space
here or a tab converted to spaces).
ii) Use TeXMacs. TeXMacs doesn't do windows and those of us who have
used TeX for fifteen plus years aren't too excited about it either.
I think we'd get more volunteers for the "User Manual" if we used
standard LaTeX. Additionally, I think currently TeXMacs is missing
too much of LaTeX and is too flaky to use on a large document.
An idea: Embed maxima in LaTeX something like:
Let {\tt buddy} be the gradient of $x^2 + y^2$. Thus
\begin{maxima}
buddy : [diff(x^2 + y^2,x), diff(x^2 + y^2,y)];
solve(buddy,[x,y]);
\end{maxima}
Write a LaTeX pre-processor that would scan a LaTeX file for
embedded maxima, extract the maxima commands, have maxima
evaluate them, TeX the output and appropriately replace the
\begin{maxima} ... \end{maxima} with TeX code. A document
written this way would more maintainable than one done by cutting
and pasting from either TeXMacs or from ASCII-art.
What do you all think?
Barton