2006/4/20, Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>:
> It occurs to me that something I've worked on and still
> have students working on, might be relevant for some
> users. I would not want to distract people from doing
> something more valuable, as suggested in my previous note.
>
> Anyway....
>
> Microsoft programs like Excel and Powerpoint
> (and to a less-compatible extent) Word,
> allow a programmer to attach, usually with a short
> Visual Basic "macro" program, nearly any other
> program.
>
> For example, I think there are such links from
> Excel to Maple, Excel to Mathematica.
> We have programs that link Excel to (Allegro Common ) Lisp, allowing,
> for example, Lisp (and in principle, Maxima)
> to operate on a range of cells in Excel.
>
> There are numerous examples of links to other
> programs from Word -- an
> example is the Equation editor program.
> Maxima could be made to work in much the same way.
> [The interface to the equation editor is rather complex --
> the equation is not a returned data structure, but the result of
> instructions to construct an equation.]
>
> I have students looking at hand-writing or speaking
> mathematics into programs like Word, using this
> technique.
could they have a look at the same functionnalities for
OpenOffice2.org ... as this program is free software like maxima and
offers a very similar interfaces for the users (who in many
circumstancies do not realize they are working with Word or
OpenOffice2.org writer)
> So you could use, as your notebook, some familiar
> program, with display /compute sections.
There are some working program to speak out text that I have tried on
my GNU/linux platform.
I suppose they could be linked too. (at least they wrok with KDE Kword)
Thanks,
Nicolas
--
Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be