Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

Andrey G. Grozin wrote:

 > Maxima language has a well-defined *mathematical*
> semantics, but no *typesetting* semantics. LaTeX has a well-defined
> typesetting semantics, and no mathematical semantics. MathML has
> typesetting semantics, and a little bit of mathematical semantics.
> 
> If somebody would like to use Maxima as a typesetting language, it will
> have to be enhanced by a lot of markup stuff. Why create a new LaTeX, when
> LaTeX works so wonderfully?
> 


Right now there is a program in maxima called displa   which takes any
maxima expression and produces a 2-dimensional fixed-width character
display on a page of width  $linel  or less.  This defines the typesetting
"semantics" in a completely deterministic way.  The program can be
changed to put in variable-width fonts and special characters like
alpha, with very little work.  It is not obvious to me that you could
mark up a maxima expression to insert "a little more space" somewhere.
I don't know if MathML would be any better in terms of this level
of markup.  LaTeX allows extra spaces with marks like ~.


The reasons not to use LaTeX are those I mentioned previously.

1. LaTex cannot do line-breaks as well as the computer program
that understands math.
2. LaTex does not have the possibility of allowing selection from
its display  (i.e. draw a box around a subexpression and use that
as input to a command).
I suppose there are other problems like:
3. Installing LaTex can be tricky.   I find it very irritating to
here from someone "try my free software X" and discover that to
use it I must first find and download and install Tcl/TK, GCL,MikTeX,
python, Perl, emacs21, new fonts, etc.

Given all this, I DO use macsyma to produce TeX, and I paste
the results in papers.
But usually I just use the fixed-width typewriter display for my
own understanding.


> 
>>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.
>>
> The answer is: Display GhostScript. GhostScript is an excellent PostScript
> interpreter; Display GhostScript incorporates Display enhancements, which
> were designed by NeXT in order to make PostScript viable as a means of
> communication between applications and display.
> 
> Andrey
> 


Does Display GhostScript run everywhere? Is it available in source
form? Can it be linked to a running Lisp system?

RJF


>