Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:
> 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.
Yes, breqn _alone_ isn't enough. The major problem is that it can't
break fractions, superscripts and subscripts. So, if you have a long
fraction
1 + 2 + ... + N
---------------
a + b + ... + n
where the denominator or numerator is too wide to fit on the screen,
then breqn doesn't help.
But imaxima does _more_ than breqn. In the above case the expression
is rewritten as
(1 + 2 + ... + N)/(a + b + ... + n)
where breqn _is_ able to do line breaking. The same applies to sub- and
superscripts.
I haven't noticed other cases where it's necessary to do this, but it
would be fairly easy to add support for some other cases as well.
The way it's actually done is somewhat ugly. It would be a lot cleaner
if breqn did it. The author of breqn, Michael Downes, told me he
intended to implement it in breqn ... but sadly Michael died of brain
cancer two weeks ago.