On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, C Y wrote:
> TeXmacs is the closest thing Maxima currently has to a
> Maple/Mathematica style interface. (I haven't checked out varsession -
> thanks for the tip :-). I'm gonna need to update the maximabook
> TeXmacs part quite a bit from the look of things.)
>
> However, this presupposes you are running Linux.
The progress of the Windows port of TeXmacs seems good. I have no access
to Windows (and don't want to :-), but it seems that TeXmacs will be
available to Windows users within a few months.
> Personally I'd recommend the latest gnuplot over the openmath stuff.
> But the same thing holds - there is currently no way to have the plot
> command "embed" the results in a document automatically. I don't know
> if TeXmacs supports it, but maybe an idea for the future would be to
> have a command defined in the maxima init stuff texmacs defines that
> would automatically load a postscript filename returned by the maxima
> process, and the maxima setup could be tweaked to support this. Not
> interactive plotting, but at least better than nothing and certainly
> more convenient than doing it by hand. Maybe there could even be a
> TeXmacs dialouge defined that could send options to the plotting
> program, but I don't know enough about TeXmacs to know if it's set up
> for that.
Yes, all of this is quite possible. TeXmacs understands postscript: tag in
a CAS output.
However, I could never understand why anybody would like to do this. The
plot in a separate window is *live*: I can manupulate it using menus of
this external window. The plot included into a TeXmacs document is *dead*.
It cannot be changed in any way, the best bet is to repeat the plotting
command with some options changed. I always very much prefer to have plots
in separate windows. If I *relly* want to include the resulting plot into
my document (which happens in 1% of cases approximately), I can export it
as a .eps file and import it into my document.
> > This requires some hand editing, especially if you want to
> > break elaborate lines in TeX in some sensible way.
> TeXmacs and emaxima will try to make use of the TeX breqn package,
> which will do VERY elementary stuff (think breaking a long sum up over
> two lines). For anything at all non-trivial though Richard's right -
> there is no automatic solution yet. Someday we may try to extend the
> routines maxima uses on the command line to handle fancier stuff, but
> the mathematics comes first and GUI related stuff is a pretty low
> priority now. :-/
TeXmacs does not need breqn. It does a pretty good job in splitting long
expressions right now and, surely, will do this even better in future. The
good thing about this is that this progress will improve interfaces to all
supported CASs at once.
Andrey