Subject: Not sure if Maxima is the best choice for this
From: Robert Dodier
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 15:09:47 +0000 (UTC)
About TeX output for ezunits, tex(foo ` bar) suppresses the backtick and
puts bar in mathrm font.
About reading data, my advice is to just write it in Maxima notation and
use 'load' to read the file. E.g. something like:
---- begin forces.mac ----
abc : [10 ` N, 20 ` N, -7 ` N];
----- end forces.mac -----
and then load("forces.mac") in your Maxima session.
About drawing graphs, see the 'draw' package and its 'vector' object in
particular. There are various options to generate output to a file (e.g.
SVG or PNG). See the options 'terminal' and 'file_name' of 'draw'.
Bear in mind that Maxima has seen various attempts to define operations
on vectors. If you are only doing simple operations such as computing
linear combinations of vectors, you can probably just represent vectors
as lists, i.e. something like [x ` lbf, y ` lbf].
Incidentally, you could write either [x ` lbf, y ` lbf] or [x, y] ` lbf.
Thanks for your interest in Maxima, and hope this helps.
Robert Dodier