Thanks for the feedback,
Line breaking - I've been thinking about exactly where the expression should
break, it seems to me that it would have to be on 'top level' operators,
e.g. the plus operator between two complex fractions. Does that seem correct
to you? By top level, I mean that in a parse tree of the expression (which I
have) they would be near the root. Anyway, it's good to know how important
this is and I'll get on it.
The other GUIs - I have looked at the other GUIs. I'm coming from a number of
angles here:
1) I want to prettify the in and out expressions to make them more legible. I
do not want to simply put the textual input & output of Maxima into a gui
window with a scroll bar. By parsing the in and out expressions I can
do far more, providing dialog boxes for complicated actions that can
actually 'understand' the expressions (such as graphing and also the
line-breaking). Kayali already extracts the variables and provides a
easy-to-use dialog box for setting ranges etc on graphs.
2) I want a Qt or KDE version to speed development and fit in with my current
environment. I am also hoping to integrate it with other KDE apps to provide
a proper document-type output (e.g. with KWord). Qt has, amongst other
things, support for unicode, advanced imaging and drawing manipulation
abilities, and a powerful widget set for user interfaces. I'm not prepared
to re-implement that in the basic X toolkit using C/C++ or
lisp/schema/tcl/tk. If you take a look at the TeXmacs 'to do' list
(http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/about/plans.en.html), you'll see that Qt
answers a lot of their requirements. The bigger foundations of Qt will
support a bigger and more feature-rich app.
3) Kayali is not just a front-end for Maxima and its advanced users, it is
intended to also be a tool for casual users of lesser mathematical ability.
To that end I want to make expression input a little easier too. TeXmacs is
very good at this.
3) The work is voluntary, so it should be enjoyable. I don't want to kick a
dead whale up a beach just to make the exponent appear in the right place.
The existing GUIs I looked at did not satisfy these criteria. TeXmacs looks
promising in respect of the graphical input/output but I don't want to spend
weeks or more learning a large lump of new code just to start achieving my
objectives - by building the foundations myself I can move forward to the
long-term goal far faster. So far I have only spent two weeks on the project
but have achieved a fair amount. This is mainly due to the power of the
python programming language coupled with the Qt development environment.
> Good luck
Thanks! Any other suggestions for 'mandatory features' will be gratefully
accepted.
Abdulhaq
On Wednesday 13 October 2004 15:02, Richard Fateman wrote:
> I can't tell from any screen shot what happens if an
> algebraic expression extends over more than one line.
>
> If the display has no method for breaking long lines
> then the GUI is not useful for most serious algebra
> users, at least in my opinion.
>
> It would be nice to know that you studied
> the 4 other GUIs for maxima on linux,
> and that you can explain why your idea is better
> for your purposes.
>
> The screen shots look nice.
> RJF
>
> Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> > Kayali looks very interesting! And I'd love to be able to work on and
> > improve a Maxima GUI built in Python (though Lisp would be better...).
> >
> > Unless I'm mistaken, though, Qt and PyQt are only available for
> > Windows under a commercial license (with some sort of exception for
> > academic use). Maxima has always been fully free (in both senses) on
> > all platforms, and I think it's important to preserve that.
> >
> > -s
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Maxima mailing list
> > Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> > http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>
> _______________________________________________
> Maxima mailing list
> Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
> http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima