Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

"Andrey G. Grozin" wrote:

> Hello *,
>
> On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Richard Fateman wrote:
> > 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.
> There is a *huge* distance from such a simple program to real typesetting.
> Have you read The TeXBook carefully? I have. It would take a lot of effort
> to implement these algorithms. TeX solves a very complicated nonlinear
> optimization problem. Development and fine-tuning of these algorithms took
> many "Knuth-years". I doubt if we have another Knuth on this mailing list.
>

I agree completely. TeX formatting algorithm is quite tricky
especially
for math. Each glyph in TeX's mathematical font have lots of 
extra parameters
which are requited to produce really fine output. I've tried once
to use
some ps fonts with TeX. At first result was perfectly ugly and I
spent
lots of time tuning some font parameters to achieve reasonable
quality.

On the other hand we have a good counter example. I mean
graphical
frontend for CAS Reduce. It exists on both Windows (psllw.exe)
and
X-Window (Xr). It doesn't use TeX fonts but just standard symbol
fonts which are present on every Windows or X installation.
It accept input in TeX (actually some subset of  TeX) and prints
it on screen with quite reasonable quality. I guess that they use
some simplified TeX's formatting algorithm. And it is good
enough to produce on screen output. But if you want really
good printed document you can process it by TeX.

Vadim

--

[ Vadim V. Zhytnikov  <vvzhy@mail.ru>  <vvzhy@td.lpi.ac.ru> ]