> On Sunday, March 23, 2003 12:33 AM, "James Amundson" wrote:
> I am afraid several people on the list have misconstrued this
> discussion. Maxima has the ability to convert its internal mathematical
> expressions into several forms, including the ascii-art 2D display and
> tex output. Several projects have used the tex output capability to
> provide typeset output. This approach has many problems, not the least
> of which being the inability to display large expressions in a
> reasonable way.
I think you are right in this conclusion.
> Nobody is suggesting that we somehow delete the tex output function.
> What we want is the ability to graphically display large expressions
> without incurring an unreasonable speed penalty. Furthermore, it would
> be very helpful if subexpressions were mouse-selectable. The question is
> whether the solution to this problem will utilize TeX itself. I don't
> think so, but that doesn't mean that we will remove any of the
> tex-related functionality we already have.
>
> --Jim
Dear Jim,
Many most sincere thanks for your above clarifications. I am not
interested whether the future Maxima releases will use TeX or
another method for the graphical representation of the output
in an elegant way (and editable too), but I am very happy to
hear from you that you will not "remove any of the tex-related
functionality we already have". Therefore, I will be able to continue
using Maxima together with LaTeX whenever this is convenient to
me (not always of course) and this is completely sufficient for me.
Naturally, I am also strongly interested (exactly as you are) in
being able to have a beautiful displayed output by Maxima
(including graphics if possible too, comments outside commands
anywhere, i.e. after ALL of the commands too, this is not possible
now, and directly printable of course, not through Windows
Notepad as we do printing here now having no more convenient
alternative!). This will make Maxima much more popular and
practically useful. I know this is planned for release 6.1 or later
without definitive decisions by you and your collaborators so far.
I also know (rather I have verified myself) that TeXmacs uses
Richard's classical mactex.lisp TeX package (inside another
file) for its Maxima so beautiful display, but I do not know
whether line breaking is possible or not for the Maxima output
(in TeXmacs) so far (and this is very important for the display
of this output). In any case, I hope that TeXmacs will be
brought to the Windows environment too in the near future
so that I can test it.
I am really thankful to you for your clarifications.
Many sincere thanks again and best regards,
Nikos