Dear Mike,
Dear David,
Dear Cliff,
Dear Colleagues,
I am now pleased to bring to your attention that I have already installed
and used the new, modern, really wonderful XMaxima prepared by
Mike. Many thanks for this new and excellent appearance of XMaxima
with additional menu selections, etc. too. Many thanks also to David and
to Cliff for having prepared the Windows binary version and the automatic
installation exe file.
The question about font enodings can be taken into account later. Many
thanks to Mike for your attention to this point too.
I have already used David's distribution yesterday and just now installed
Cliff's distribution (automatic installation included), which seems working
in a similar manner. My further suggestions for improvement concern the
following points. Some of them can be taken into account just now if
Mike has some more time available, the other suggestions are more
difficult and, perhaps, need to be postponed for the next release: 5.9.1.
My comments have as follows:
I used Maxima in two Windows Millennium computers. In the first
of them I had problems when calling Maxima such as
Starting Maxima timed out. Wait longer?
(and I really had to wait longer). In the second machine no such problem.
In both machines error messages appear quite frequently during a
session and insist to be there. The error message
Error: can not find channel named "sock76" ("sock80" too in other cases).
is frequent, very frequent. With the word "insist" I mean that I have
been finally obliged to Restart maxima from its left menu. In at least
one time an unjustified error of the above type appeared (and insisted)
although most times this happens after an error by me in the
command line. (In any case, insisting errors and frequent resort to
Restart are somewhat inconvenient.)
In the tcl console, I obtained the message (in red)
bgerror failed to handle background error,
Original error: can not find channel named "sock76"
Error in bgerror invoked "break" outside of a loop
In the first machine I feel I have also starting errors when
loading Maxima. Perhaps this was due to my using xmaxima
instead of xmaxima.bat in the call to Maxima (.bat has to be
added, no priority of the .bat file. Why?)
In the second machine the situation has been greatly improved
without delays in starting maxima. I have also been able to
install Maxima in Pogram Files (with the space present) simply
by using the MS-DOS abbreviation Progra~1 for this
directory in the (edited) XMaxima.bat file.
Naturally, thanks to Mike, XMaxima's exit kills the underlying
Maxima's session automatically (the quit() command is not
required any more.) This is a serious improvement.
Another (unjustified) error has been
incorrect syntax: 1 is not an infix operator
(without an error by me at all). Another time, an error concerning
the previous command seems appeared when I was working on
the second command (in the middle of the second command). This
behaviour has been strange for me. The bad thing is also that
the errors insist and one has to restart.
A simple error (easy to fix) concern the Ctrl-C command (from
the keybord), which causes cut (like Ctrl+X) and not copy.
With the mouse driven menu, it is O.K., it works.
With respect to the font selection, there is some difficulty
(I had to press the mouse three or four times in order to
be able to proceed to a selection, generally, not always,
successful).
The problem with the selected forn, Courier New, is just
its small characters. I would like to have big characters,
more explicitly about 76 characters per line, now these
are 106. This means that any saved output from Maxima
is very long to be further processes (e.g. in Notepad.)
I insist that the situation with the default font (Courier New)
or, better, Courier New Bold should change in favour of
a bigger font by 2 pt. (about 20%). In this comment,
unfortunately, I do not agree with Mike and Michel too.
(I wish that we go back in this respect. This change is
important.)
A minor bug concerns the auxiliary window (that with
the Maxima'a Toggle Browser Visibility menu command.)
When I work in full screen and perform this command twice,
I do not come back with the same auxiliary window, but
with a smaller one, whereas the main window remains
the same. This is not an extremely important bug, but it
would be nice if it could be fixed.
For a Greek computer, the selected encoding has been the
Western European (cp1252). This will be arranged in the
future. This problem (due to Freewrap, ordinary Tcl works O.K.)
and similar encoding problems will be taken care in the future
thanks to Mike.
The additions to the menus (e.g. that for killing variables, etc.)
are very useful as well as the addition for copying (Ctrl+C),
not simply cuting (Ctrl+X now). Yet, I would like to see more
commands in the menus now or in the future if Mike can devote
additional time to this project.
One such addition concerns a menu box with the command
Select All (Ctrl-/) (in fact Ctrl and Slash).
This is a useful command and I learnt its existence just
yesterday. Perhaps, an even more useful command (for me
I mean) would be a command about
Copy All (Ctrl-/ and Ctrl-C) (a composite command)
This is useful for my having to move the whole session to
Notepad and have it printed there.
Incidentally, sincs Maxima/XMaxima offer no direct
printing capabilities for commands and ordinary output,
a menu with popular text processors (e.f. Notepad and
PFE), transfer there without killing Maxima, would be
very useful. (I am using Notepad now.)
With respect to printing, perhaps after Ctrl-/ (selecting all)
and Ctrl-C (copying, finally copying all to the clipboard),
perhaps I repeat, there could be a possibility of direct
printing (to a real printer a mean, not to a display). Is there
such a possibility: to send the session to a printer not
to the display, the standard output? (It is known this can be
done of course, but not implemented yet!) Any idea please?
Naturally, I complete agree with Cliff that a save button in
the menus would be also useful.
I am always asking more and more to be done . . .
I am asking too much! I must apologize!
Yet, I must congratulate again all the developers of Maxima
and XMaxima for their impressive work so far and, today,
particularly, Mike for his work with XMaxima. Perhaps,
James will have now to change his negative opinion about
XMaxima. Isn't this so?
(I have to proceed to further tests in order to be able to proceed
to further suggestions with respect to the improvement of XMaxima.
Now I feel that inside a session the number of insisting error
messages having to do with "Sock76" or "Sock80" should be
significantly reduced, the font height should be increased by 20%
and the Ctrl+C command from the keyboard should be corrected.
The other points I posed (such as a menu button for Select All, Ctrl-/)
perhaps later although some of them are important, especially
because of the bug that Maxima essentially cannot use the writefile()
command. (This is a serious bug.)
I feel there is also a "bug" with marks on the lines of the session.
More explicitly, when transferring a Maxima session to Wordpad
or to Word I automatically lose the vertical alignment (necessary
for powers, etc.) I feel that this is a kind of bug in Maxima through
the introduction of special characters (arrows and dots in the low
ASCII region: 0 to 31), which are misinterpreted by Wordpad/Word
although not by Notepad. Is there any idea please, about how can
this avoided? (Perhaps I will have to send a devoted message to
the mailing list for this particular important point).
A minor bug concerns the loss of vertical arrangement in a
"positive" reply of mine to Maxima on the evaluation of an
integral. This is not so important. (Generally, the reply is "p"
and no problem then.)
I can finally add that it could be better for Cliff's automatic
installation to take place in Program Files (as I suggested above
and already done) and not simply to Programs. (Most Windows
machines use Program Files for the programs' installation.)
Many thanks and congratulations again. The new XMaxima has a
very beautiful and more modern look, it's really lovely, it can
be installed automatically and I am already happy to use it.
I remain at your disposition for further explanations on the above
comments. These have been my first impressions. I may be wrong
with some of them and, surely, I have to proceed to further tests,
but I need time
Kindest regards from Patras,
Nikos