possibility of making wxMaxima the default GUI (instead of Xmaxima)
Subject: possibility of making wxMaxima the default GUI (instead of Xmaxima)
From: van Nek
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 11:29:03 +0100
I vote against !!!
Hello Robert,
from my actual point of knowledge about and experience with wxmaxima I must vote
against having wxmaxima as the default gui.
reasoning:
+++ The great advantage of wxmaxima is, that it helps users to get the right input.
- - - The headache I have at the moment is concerning the output format of wxmaxima.
I use xmaxima in my classes and my students copy the input and output lines from
xmaxima to ms word. By using Lucida as font for instance the output with exponents
and fractions is nicely displayed. In exame tests this must happen in a very short time
and doing it just by copy and paste fits our needs. The students have to write a lot of
comments in between the maxima lines. In ms word or open office this is easy to do.
With wxmaxima copy and paste is not possible (?). The output is available in html
format and then saved in png graphics. I don't believe, that all my students ( I must say
that for a lot of students their work with maxima is their first contact with a computer )
are able to work with this format. Maybe this is possible in a wysiwyg html editor like
frontpage. But in any case one has to learn some additional methods to work with the
wxmaxima output.
I don't want to think about latex output in this context. Perhaps there are other
possibilities that I don't know. I am open to learn ...
Perhaps we can ask Andrej to make it additionally possible to have the xmaxima output
format into a text file. The functions for this should be all there.
Volker van Nek