I can't find photot online, but it was written in Franz Lisp, not Common
Lisp, and it was supposed to run on VAX Unix, interfacing with "troff" and
"eqn".
The copyright should not be an issue. The UC Regents are not going to try
to charge you for using this.
And it should be rewritten, as you say. If you have a copy, feel free to
share it.
Actually what I suspect should be done is to take the smart formatting
already computed by the display program in maxima or wxmaxima, fix it up a
little more for better "ladder" display, and then replace the final display
output by a conversion to TeX. This last bit may be aided by the mactex
program already there.
Spacing might not work exactly right because Maxima doesn't have the same
model of "glue" as TeX.
If the goal is to make a display that works with imaxima, it may be
plausible to avoid using TeX at all.
And there used to be a tex-math-mode formatter entirely in Lisp, written by
some people in France.
Also Bill Schelter had a program that ran on lisp machines rather like
Texmacs.
RJF
> -----Original Message-----
> From: C Y [mailto:smustudent1 at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 9:40 PM
> To: Morten H?gholm
> Cc: fateman at EECS.Berkeley.EDU; maxima at math.utexas.edu
> Subject: Re: [Maxima] breqn and maxima
>
> Morten H?gholm wrote:
> > On Dec 15, 2007, at 5:54 PM, Richard Fateman wrote:
> >
> > Hi Richard,
> >
> >> John Foderaro wrote a program to break up expressions in
> Macsyma for
> >> use by "eqn" (a predecessor to the TeX equation
> processor). It is not
> >> clear you are aware of it (1978, "photot").
> >
> > I was not - thank you for bringing it to my attention. My
> na?ve search
> > on Google only brought up references to it so I have asked my
> > librarian to work some magic.
>
> I was under the impression a copy of photot was available on the web -
> I'm a bit confused now because checking my personal Maxima archive I
> have a copy of photot.lisp and photot.mailer but Google finds neither.
> Dr. Fateman, I thought I remembered this being on your
> website - I have
> no other plausible source for where I got it - but I'm not
> spotting it now.
>
> I see no license info, but there is a copyright notice from
> 1979 for the
> Regents of the University of California so presumably they would have
> final say in any licensing of the code. On the other hand the author
> indicates it's formatted more like C code than lisp code so perhaps a
> re-factoring/re-write would be in order anyway...
>
> CY
>