>>>>> "willisb" == willisb <willisb@unk.edu> writes:
willisb> After volunteering to write a section for the "User Manual" on the
willisb> special function package, I started thinking about how to best
willisb> present maxima examples in TeX. A few thoughts on the possibilities:
willisb> i) Use maxima ASCI-art math. This is the honest approach because
willisb> it what most users will see on the screen; however, it looks 1970-ish,
willisb> takes up too much space, and it is easily messed up (an extra space
willisb> here or a tab converted to spaces).
willisb> ii) Use TeXMacs. TeXMacs doesn't do windows and those of us who have
willisb> used TeX for fifteen plus years aren't too excited about it either.
willisb> I think we'd get more volunteers for the "User Manual" if we used
willisb> standard LaTeX. Additionally, I think currently TeXMacs is missing
willisb> too much of LaTeX and is too flaky to use on a large document.
willisb> An idea: Embed maxima in LaTeX something like:
willisb> Let {\tt buddy} be the gradient of $x^2 + y^2$. Thus
willisb> \begin{maxima}
willisb> buddy : [diff(x^2 + y^2,x), diff(x^2 + y^2,y)];
willisb> solve(buddy,[x,y]);
willisb> \end{maxima}
willisb> Write a LaTeX pre-processor that would scan a LaTeX file for
willisb> embedded maxima, extract the maxima commands, have maxima
willisb> evaluate them, TeX the output and appropriately replace the
willisb> \begin{maxima} ... \end{maxima} with TeX code. A document
willisb> written this way would more maintainable than one done by cutting
willisb> and pasting from either TeXMacs or from ASCII-art.
willisb> What do you all think?
I think one of graphicx or ps packages does some kind of such parsing
to figure out how to dimension the space for the image.
However, since my usage of maxima is either via the command line or
via XEmacs, I rather like to see exactly what maxima is going to print
out.
I guess it really depends on whether the we expect the user reading
the manual is using the command-line or xmaxima or some other GUI.
The reference manual, when in ps or PDF form, however, should include
TeX instead of ASCII art do describe the functions. There's no reason
not to. (My simple elliptic functions texinfo documentation currently
does that. When rendered as an info file, you get ASCII art, but nice
formulas when rendered in Postscript or PDF.)
Ray