changing maxima display to plaintext notation



Hello Justin,

> I am a new member to the list, and a new user to maxima.  I am blind  
> and depend on the built in screenreading program called voiceover in  
> the mac os x operating system.  I installed maxima through macports.   
> It is the command line version.

> Everything seems to work really well until I get an output that has
> some sort of spacial effect to it.  The best example I can provide is
> superscripts.  type
>
> factor(4);
>
> The output is something like a 2, with another 2 above it.

That's a good start. Try setting
display2d:false;

This will cause maxima to output everything line by line. The 
output format is pretty similiar to the input syntax.

There is also the function tex() which takes an expression as
argument and returns what could be its TeX representation. Perhaps
this is useful too?

If you have any feedback on how to make maxima (or some resources
like the wiki or the this mailing list - quoting style comes to
mind) more accessible, I would be interested to know.

Harald