Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

Andrey G. Grozin wrote:

> Hello *,
> 
> On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, C Y wrote:
> 
>>Well, we might be able to teach GtkMathView to understand maxima, too -
>>it's a question which is the better solution.
>>
> I don't quite understand you. The current Maxima output format is not
> formalized enough to be an alternative to LaTeX or MathML. If you want to
> formalize it and to create a new math typesetting language in addition to
> LaTeX and MathML, I am against such a thing. It's better to use MathML. I
> can try to write MathML generation in Maxima patterned after LaTeX
> generation. It would be useful anyway.


I quite disagree.  In fact, the semantics or the syntactic appearance 
for typeset mathematics in MathML is, so far as I can tell,  not 
formally specified, and for LaTeX there is deliberately no semantics 
associated with the appearance so that $AB$  could be A*B  or matrix 
multiply AB or a symbol AB.   and $A^(4)$ could mean the 4th derivative. 
Or something else.   For Maxima, the meaning of any utterance is what it 
means to Maxima, which is operationally defined, and is entirely formal 
in the sense of computation. You might not like that computation, but it 
is formally expressed in the program.  MathML is expressed in some 
slipperly natural language. On top of that it is about 20 times more 
verbose.

I think that it may be politically the right thing to use MathML, and 
relatively easy to make MathML using the same style as the mactex.lisp 
program, but from a technical standpoint I think that MathML offers very 
little, at least if you are using it for Maxima <--> Maxima front end.
If you make Maxima front ends out of browsers, then there would be
a possible motive.


> 
> 
>>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.
>>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that wxWindows is used in
> several free software projects, and gtk - in several thousand projects.
> This means it will never die. And I don't like too high towers - wxWindows
> on top of gtk on top of Xlib.
> 
> You can also consider another option (though I don't like it for the same
> reason - too high tower). Qt is supported by TrollTech on both Posix
> platforms and Windows. It can now directly include gtk widgets, in
> particular, I suppose, GtkMathView. It is GPLed (NOT LGPL!).
> 
> 
>>I'm familiar with Scigraphica, and I agree it looks attractive, but I'm
>>not sure if it has ever been compiled on Windows.
>>
> Most of it is in Python, and need no compilation. We only have to compile
> gtk-extra.
> 
> Andrey


In the interests of not building towers, I would still prefer taking
whatever is written (say in Python!) and writing it it lisp so that
we have Maxima  (in lisp)  generating a picture-language that is
nothing more than a glyph/position collection  (and maybe even plotting, 
too?)  talking to a very simple and OS/machine independent display. 
Maybe even a postscript interpreter.

But all these other options may be interesting too... I can't say I've 
tried them!

RJF


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