Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

Hello *,

> Instead of making the output of maxima run through
> tex, why don't we change the output of the Maxima display
> program to be whatever information is actually needed
> to display.  I don't know if this is some kind of
> unicode or postscript or some other format, but the
> program that displays
>         2
>        x
> 
> can certainly learn to use different size fonts and
> spaces.  Since the maxima program also presumable has
> some environmental access it can tell how wide your display
> is and such stuff.
First, high-quality typesetting of formulae is not a trivial problem. Just
have a look at the sizes of programs that can do it well: TeX, lout,
TeXmacs. Your suggestion amounts to reimplementing one of them in Lisp. No
doudt, this is possible. The above examples show that this would require
many man-years of work.
Second, what OS API do you propose to use? Direct use of Win32 API is
tedious, and it would mean that all this work will be useless on all
platforms but one. You mentioned PostScript. It was indeed used for
display in NeXTStep, and can be used now in GNUStep with Display
GhostScript. Not too wide choice. Use X protocole? X fonts are not
particularly well suited for mathematics (this is the reason why LyX has
not so good display quality as TeXmacs).

I'd say that it is much better not to re-invent too many wheels, and to
use high-quality free software available. It seems to me that running TeX
on each Maxima output is a bit heavy-weight (though the results should be
good). I think that TeXmacs is a better solution. Have you used it? When
TeXmacs-Maxima interface works, it produces very high-quality results. I
think, we should stabilize this interface, maybe, merging it with Emaxima.
They should have, I suppose, very much code in common.

Best wishes,
Andrey