Subject: Responder: Re: [Maxima] Macsyma is still sold???
From: C Y
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2003 18:40:01 -0700 (PDT)
--- offray.luna@javeriana.edu.co wrote:
>
> I think that we have to work more closely in integration with TeXmacs
> for being the Open Source Mathematica replace and for think in a
> better interface.
IIRC, improving the TeXmacs connection is largely dependant on our
making some changes to make interfacing between Maxima and GUIs easier.
That will most likely happen, but perhaps not for a while yet.
> Most of the people who use Mathematica (and Maxima) are
> not "applications writers" but scientific documents writers,
> (students, mathematicians, physcians, researchers). So I think that
> for a Wider user base is better to think in the document like the
> default interface with Maxima (thougt TeXmacs). I'm not saying that
> a separate graphical interface is not worth, but will be nicer to
have
> other document oriented Interface throught TeXmacs. For example a way
> to produce "non interactive plottings" a la gnuplot will be nice for
> integrating Maxima Plots with TeXmacs documents.
Well, here are my thoughts on the whole document interface thing - I
agree our GUI should by default think in terms of creating mathematical
documents, but I think this job can be done better by a custom lisp
based GUI. The integration with TeXmacs is very good for cases where
one wishes to include Maxima in WYSIWYG documents that aren't only
mathematical worksheets, but I think for creating a Mathematica style
environment a native lisp interface is more robust in the long run.
With a custom interface, the interface can be tailored much more easily
to all the various aspects of Maxima. It should be quite possible to
have the math document of the Maxima gui be exported to TeX or MathML
- most of that capability already exists in Maxima itself - TeX export
has been around for years and there are a couple MathML efforts out
there as well. Other document types could be added if someone wanted
to figure out the format and how to translate to it. Indeed, with the
cl-pdf tools available it might be possible to directly generate pdf
math documents from Maxima. Hopefully the STIX fonts will be released
some day to complete the tool set.
> Just some ideas for discuss about them.
Ideas are fun :-). We have other priorities than the GUI to handle
first, but I think it will be really cool when we can turn our full
attention to it.
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