Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

--- "Andrey G. Grozin" <A.G.Grozin@inp.nsk.su> wrote:

> I agree that GtkMathView is an interesting piece of free software. In
> many ways, GtkMathView interface to Maxima will be similar to TeXmacs
> interface, with LaTeX replaced by MathML. Personally, I am not a
> great fan of MathML: it is more complicated and more verbose than 
> LaTeX, and I don't see significant advantages. But its expressive 
> power is not worse than that of LaTeX, surely. It would be easy to 
> write MathML generation in Maxima, similarly to the current TeX 
> generation functions - a few hundreds lines of code, I guess.

Well, we might be able to teach GtkMathView to understand maxima, too -
it's a question which is the better solution.  As much as any of us
might dislike mathml, it will be the standard for web based mathematics
in the future.  Mozilla already has some basic support for it.  The
ability of maxima to export mathml has interesting possibilities when
it comes to an easy way to create web pages with maxima sessions in
them.

> I don't quite understand why you want to replace gtk by wxWindows.
> gtk is a nice cross-platform GUI library. Writing a GUI with it is 
> rather simple, the library is light enough, and compiles even on 
> Windows, as I heard. Why not write a GUI in gtk, with GtkMathView as 
> its main widget? 

That is a possibility, but there are several problems with it.  First,
the Windows port of GTK is maintained by the same person who ported the
GIMP, and AFAIK is not part of the main GTK effort.  This means if this
individual should lose interest or have to quit working on it, we could
be out in the cold.  wxWindows has a large user and maintainer base,
and as a consequence is a more stable long term development target,
IMHO.  Second, GTK for Windows does not have the look of a native
Windows application.  This is a minor point, but in many cases the
overall user experience with a program, particularly on windows, can be
worsened by this.  wxWindows has the advantage of using the native look
of whatever platform it happens to be on.  On Linux, it can use GTK or
Motif, on Windows it looks like Windows.  Since the larger audience for
Maxima is currently Windows users, it might be worth it to take
advantage of wxWindow's feature set here.  To me it just seemed like an
overall cleaner solution in the long term.  It does involve more up
front work, and will mean a longer development time until the first
release, but if we can do it hopefully it will give us more breathing
room and options down the road.

If you want to play with GTK a bit, though, I have a glade file at
http://mathshield.sourceforge.net which you are more than welcome to
use, if it's of any interest.  I started it a while back, and haven't
had the time to do much with it lately.  The site says perl, but you
will be able to use Glade to generate code for C/C++ as well, if I
recall glade's feature set correctly.  The images files you need can be
pulled from CVS.

>Also, there is gtk-extra, which contains additional widgets for  
>plotting. This library was used in SciGraphica - a free program for 
>production of publication-quality plots (similar to Origin). Why not 
>use it instead of VTK? It's small, and some code from SciGraphica can 
>be re-used.

I'm familiar with Scigraphica, and I agree it looks attractive, but I'm
not sure if it has ever been compiled on Windows.  If we were writing
only for Linux I would say your solution is better - it's the cross
platform nature of the problem which sticks some monkey wrenches into
the gears.  The reason I suggested wxWindows and VTK is that they are
already known to work with both Linux and Windows, both are maintained
by teams of developers to be cross platform, both are very powerful and
will likely be flexible when we add features in the future, and
wxWindows I believe even works on MacOS, which at some point might be
of interest.  PowerLisp exists for MacOS, and is free for personal use
at least, although I don't know if anyone has ever tried compiling
Maxima on it yet, and if that is made to work then we might want to
think about the possibility of a three platform interface.


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Send your FREE holiday greetings online!
http://greetings.yahoo.com