Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:

...
> The problem of displaying Mathematical markup on multiple platforms has
> never been fully addressed by any free library I am aware of.  The
> closest one, which I beleve is the one most worth expanding and/or
> basing our own solution on, is GtkMathView.  I have had communications
> with the author indicating the code is not deeply tied to the GTK
> toolkit, and just within the past few days someone has gotten it to
> compile on Windows, so at least in theory it should be portable. 
> Everyone I have heard discuss the code, even the founder of Gnome who
> is usually highly critical of C++ code, says it is very well done.  Its
> display, while perhaps not of the quality of TeX, is certainly high. 
> It also has the ability to export to postscript.  Currently it is
> mathml based, but if we were to add the ability to understand maxima's
> representation of mathematics, the possibilities would begin to open
> up.

Using GtkMathView sounds like a good idea.  
Was getting it to compile on Windows a tricky affair, do you know?

Also, instead of getting GtkMathView to understand Maxima's output,
wouldn't it make more sense to give Maxima the ability to output in
MathML? GtkMathView would then be able to deal with the Maxima output,
and since MathML has aspirations of becoming the lingua franca of
computer math applications, I would expect this would become useful in
other areas besides display.

On a slightly different note, MuPAD has an output filter capability;
the command
Pref::output(fn)
will result in all subsequent output being replaced by fn(output).
I would think that something like this in Maxima would make it easier
for different frontends to get the output in a useful form.

Jay