Dear Jesper,
I have been very pleased to see and print the screen shot of the
multilingual Maxima session you have prepared with Maxima
and CLISP (a Unicode capable LISP):
> On April 16, 2003 "Jesper Harder" <harder@ifa.au.dk> wrote
> If you use a Unicode capable Lisp, then this pretty much works. Here's
> a screen shot of a Maxima session where I used Greek, Cyrillic,
> Ethiopean, Hebrew, and Runic variable names:
>
> <http://ifa.au.dk/~harder/uni-maxima.png>;
I believe this is an excellent possibility in Maxima to become standard
in its distribution in the future if possible.
I also completely agree with the comments by Felix below:
> On April 15, 2003 "Felix E. Klee" <felix.klee@inka.de> wrote:
> The core packages certainly should be in english. But it would be nice if
> people working e.g. in a german environment can use all the characters in
> their alphabet (this will simplify the use of Maxima for example in high
> school environments). In addition, it would be nice if people could use
> greek characters, etc. in their calculations without the hassle of TeX.
But
> neither of these characters (including capital characters) should be used
> in the user interface of core packages.
I would like to add that I am also using Greek characters in Maxima
5.9.0 now (previously 5.5 beta) by using XMaxima under Windows
after having inserted a one-line command in the XMaxima TCL file
informing that the encoding should be cp1253. Then I can use Greek
characters both in complete sentences (between the lines) or in
mathematical formulae, but either in single symbols there or in strings.
(For Western European languages, this seems to be already possible
in Maxima through the standard cp1252 encoding used by Maxima.)
The good thing is that I can use the Greek characters themselves (not
\alpha, etc.). The second good thing is that TeX command leaves
these characters intact, contrary to what happens in Mathematica
as far as I remember (and I have suffered with Mathematica in the
past, since it insists that the Greek characters are not acceptable
in Notebooks and TeX output, as far as I remember, as single
characters I mean although they are completely acceptable in
Unicode and TeX notation, respectively). Therefore, in Maxima
the Greek characters in text or in formulae go directly to the
TeX source file and, next, to the dvi file, etc. This situation
makes me extremely happy and is one of the major advantages
of Maxima compared to Mathematica as far as I am concerned.
Yet, there is one rather serious difficulty I would like to mention:
As far as I have understood, XMaxima uses the Windows
unicode-style position of the Greek alphabet. This permits me to
directly use in Maxima the standard Windows fonts, such as
Courier, Arial and Times New Roman. This is the correct way
of working. The bad situation is that TeX (at least the TeX I
know) works with only 256 characters and does not respect
the Unicode position of the Greek characters. I have resolved
this problem by using old 256-characters Greek fonts in TeX,
which have the Greek characters in the interval 128-255 (but,
unfortunately, these fonts are incompatible with Maxima/
XMaxima, i.e. Maxima cannot use them). I would like to know
whether there is any possibility for the improvement of this
situation in the near future as far as TeX is concerned I mean.
(Is there any Unicode TeX already ready and working or
some other solution to the above problem, naturally not for the
Greek language only, but for many additional languages too?)
In other words, do you feel it is possible to use the Maxima
output in your multilingual sessions inside an ordinary TeX
document (with the accessibility of Unicode fonts of course?)
The second point where I have difficulties is that I am still
unable to use the Greek characters in Maxima formulae with
the exception of strings and single Greek symbols. Therefore, I
cannot use symbols with more than one Greek character or a
Greek character and an English character (in the same symbol)
or a Greek character and a number (in the same symbol) although
a Greek character and a subsrcipt (in brackets) is acceptable. It
seems that Maxima (at least 5.9.0 under GCL in Windows) has
the tendency to use (internally only) a backslash before a Greek
letter and this is what causes the above difficulty. Do you feel
that this could be avoided and, therefore, these restrictions could
not be valid any more? This will permit me to use symbols with
many Greek letters or mixed Greek-English symbols and, more-
over, Greek commands, which is of particular interest to me.
Have you tried this possibility (multi-character symbols) in
your CLISP-based Maxima?
As far as the typing of the Greek characters in Windows is
concerned, it is perhaps possible, to be able to use a Greek
keyboard simultaneously with the English one and additional
ones too. I have not tried this possibility, but I believe this is
possible in Windows (i.e. to use keyboards for more than
one language). The position of the Greek characters is
almost obvious or it can be found once and for all. I do not
believe that multi-chracter escape sequences are necessary
even outside Emacs (although I am not using Emacs.)
I would be extremely thankful to you for any clarification on
the above points and I am particularly interested in being
able to use multi-character Greek symbols in Maxima, a
task in which I have failed so far. (Naturally, analogous
may be the situation with Western European symbols in
the standard Maxima distribution, but I have not tested
in this respect.)
With many sincere thanks in advance and best regards
from Patras,
Nikos
> --- On April 16, 2003 "Jesper Harder" <harder@ifa.au.dk> wrote
> James Frye <frye@cs.unr.edu> writes:
>
> > If Maxima could represent such characters internally with e.g. the
> > appropriate Unicode, and display them according to whatever the
> > current display can handle, then the big problem for most of us is
> > having a way to input them.
>
> If you use a Unicode capable Lisp, then this pretty much works. Here's
> a screen shot of a Maxima session where I used Greek, Cyrillic,
> Ethiopean, Hebrew, and Runic variable names:
>
> <http://ifa.au.dk/~harder/uni-maxima.png>;
>
> (Note: This is from a Maxima compiled with CLISP, it won't work with
> CMUCL -- I didn't try gcl).
>
> > My keyboard is noticably lacking in Greek characters, and it's much
> > easier to remember \\alpha than whatever the multi-character escape
> > code is...
>
> I ran it in an Emacs shell where you can select different so called
> "input methods". One of them is called 'TeX' -- it works as you'd
> expect: if you type "\alpha" you get an alpha etc.