>>>>> "Andrey" == Andrey G Grozin writes:
Andrey> Unfortunately, maxima does this from t=-\infty. I dislike
Andrey> this behaviour very much, because x[1] also produces
Andrey> $$x_1$$. But I didn't do radical changes in the way tex
Andrey> behaves, according to my personal tastes; I only tried to
Andrey> fix bugs. One of these bugs (reported in the bug database
Perhaps that's the right approach at this time for an imminent
release.
Even though I've never used maxima to produce tex for a paper, I'd
like to see these things fixed eventually.
Anyway, some of the comments were not directed to your patch, but to
mactex in general.
Andrey> 1. Let's take omega. maxtex with my patch contains
Andrey> (defprop $omega "\\omega" texword)
Andrey> (defprop $Omega "\\Omega" texword)
Andrey> I thought that the maxima variable omega corresponds to
Andrey> the lisp variable $omega, and tex() will convert it into
Andrey> \omega; the maxima variable Omega corresponds to the lisp
Andrey> variable $Omega, and tex() will convert it into
Andrey> \Omega. Now I see (experimentally) that this is wrong:
Andrey> tex(omega) produces \Omega. But why??? Does the maxima
Andrey> variable omega correspond to the lisp
Almost. maxima omega is $OMEGA; maxima Omega is |$Omega|. So now I
know why tex(omega) produces \Omega: there are two definitions for
omega:
(defprop $omega "\\omega" texword)
(defprop $Omega "\\Omega" texword)
In Lisp with the default reader, $omega and $Omega are both $OMEGA, so
the second definition replaces the first. So, replacing the second
with
(defprop |$Omega| "\\Omega" texword)
should fix this issue. This was obviously missed when the great
case-sensitivity change was made.
Andrey> 2. gamma means Gamma-function in maxima.
Andrey> tex(gamma(x)) => \Gamma(x)
Andrey> and this is, I think, The Right
Andrey> Thing. Unfortunately. Unless we want to rename the
Andrey> Gamma-function to be Gamma(x), and we probably don't want:
Andrey> this would break a lot of code.
Andrey> tex(%gamma) => \gamma
I also think these are ok, because they're functions known to maxima.
Andrey> this means that a user who input the greek letter \gamma
Andrey> in the TeXmacs interface, gets
Andrey> %gamma, the Euler constant. Not a very intuitive thing: somebody may
Andrey> want to call his coefficients by just the greek letters
Andrey> \alpha, \beta, \gamma, without thinking about the Euler
Andrey> constant.
I don't have a solution for this. I'm also not a TeXmacs user.
Andrey> 3. Should tex(pi) produce \pi or not? In the pre-case-sensitive era, it
Andrey> did. I don't like this behaviour, but I cannot decide to break this long
Andrey> tradition without a wider discussion. By the way, inputting the greek
Andrey> letter \pi in the TeXmacs interface always produces %pi, not pi.
Don't know the answer for this either.
We should discuss these things, eventually, though.
>> Also, Barton Willis has some comments about mactex, from 2002-08-19.
>> We should look into that as well.
Andrey> Where can I find them?
Hmm. I have forgotten where the maxima mailing lists are archived.
Definitely not sourceforge. gmane.org might have them.
Ray