Dear Yannick,
I generally agree with your comments. Many thanks for them! An
additional comment for XMaxima and a question for TeXmacs
follow:
> On Sunday, March 23, 2003 1:51 PM : "Yannick Versley" wrote:
> (c) letting the user put text that is not meant for maxima
> somewhere between the formulas.
> - xmaxima
> I like the ability to display help below the actual interaction.
> As far as I know, it has no support whatsoever for doing (1)
I would like to clarify that XMaxima is completely able to permit the
user to add actual text (not just Maxima comments) between commands
or even between a command and its output with the exception of the
line after the last command of a session so long as it remains the last
command (although this text is NOT saved in a sav file to be reused
in Maxima). This can easily happen essentially in any language of the
world (such as Greek, Cyrillic or Turkish even simultaneously in the
same session) by having available and using the related encoding(s)
and, in the standard distribution, in English and all Western European
languages. The Maxima display (commands, output and text
between the lines) can next be saved in a file (by using Mike's
Edit -> Save Console to File valuable addition) or copied (by
using the mouse) to any monospaced word processor such as
PFE (that I am using for LaTeX) or Windows Notepad, in the
latter case through the command: system(notepad)$ or through
an easily installed related menu option. (Yet, after this Maxima
output transfer, multilingual support with different encodings, e.g.
Greek and Cyrillic simultaneously, seems to be lost in Windows,
since Windows employ just one encoding. Naturally, English
and Greek is completely possible, since they belong to the same
encoding!) This has been just a comment. In fact, I tend to
prefer to add my text in PFE (or Notepad) itself by copying
just the Maxima session including the TeX output (better the
part of it I am already satisfied with) there.
The very bad things with XMaxima are mainly its very ugly
output and its inability for direct printing. For both of them a
change/improvement is necessary through the future replacement
of XMaxima, but, I must confess, their influence when preparing
a high-quality LaTeX document with Maxima is quite minor if any.
> - TeXmacs
> is probably not exactly what you want for (1), since you cannot put text
> between the lines of a maxima session
Is this last negative comment really true? (This can easily be done with
XMaxima as I mentioned just above.) I cannot believe it!
Finally, I would also like to be able to make additional computations
between the commands, not only at the end of a session. This is not
possible in XMaxima (a new command only at the end!). Where is
this possible?
My conclusion is that XMaxima (in spite of its serious disadvantages)
already constitutes an almost perfect environment for me to prepare
high-quality LaTeX mathematical documents computationally based
on Maxima.
Naturally, any further improvement will be extremely welcome!
Best regards from Patras,
Nikos