--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I haven't been installing any of this stuff, but
> now that I see that imaxima is using breqn, my
> interest in doing so takes a major drop. I have
> tried breqn and found it to be slow and not
> able to break up anything but very simple
> expressions.
>
> Are people actually using this collection for
> non-trivial calculations? If you have
> LOOONG expressions, the splitting must be computed
> in maxima, not after mactex does its job.
>
> RJF
I am using Emaxima to write maximabook, and Jay was just
able to add breqn support after figuring out how imaxima
did it. It does only do trivial breaking, but that is
enough to make it very useful for the maximabook.
If we could get maxima itself to generate TeX with the
proper breaking included it would be wonderful, but I don't
have the faintest idea how that would work. The proper
place for line breaks would change with things like paper
size, fonts used, and all sorts of stuff only determined
when the tex file is compiled. Possibly one could define
a file where you define various common parameters and then
tell Maxima which ones you wanted to use, but without
something like that Maxima would have no ability to generate
intelligent line breaks for tex. It would also involve
extending Maxima's internal line breaking routines substantially,
if I understand correctly how Maxima works. (I freely admit I
may have it wrong.)
breqn, for all it's faults, works at the time of tex compile,
which is why it turns out to be useful. Hopefully someday we
can do better, for now this is a good, useful step.
CY
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