Maybe some work to make Maxima display much better

Hello,

> >>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.
> 
> 
> I think that quality typesetting from TeX requires some hand corrections
> in some cases, so even TeX is not a perfect solution.  On the other 
> hand, for visual display on a screen, TeX is probably too good (it has a 
> higher resolution than necessary) and also not good enough, because of 
> line breaks and feedback.

Would it be possible to modify displa to make it output a set of TeX subformulas, 
to be displayed one under the other, instead of the set of 2-dimensional 
displays? For instance, if we ask Maxima to compute 1000!, the result is 
displayed as 16 lines (i.e. as 16 "2-dimensional displays" of 1 line each for 
this simple case), and displa might output a set of 16 TeX subformulas ? (trivial 
refinement : allow  larger value for width  $linel, to take into account the fact 
that TeX display might be more compact than standard Maxima display) 

This way, we could benefit at the same time from the ability of Maxima to split 
long formulas (as compared to TeX's inability to split them) and the ability of 
TeX to produce beautiful output (as compared to limited ability of Maxima) ?
 
Best wishes
Michel.Lavaud@univ-orleans.fr
http://www.univ-orleans.fr/EXT/ASTEX
ftp://ftp.univ-orleans.fr/pub/tex/PC/AsTeX
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