Subject: Exporting examples for use in other applications
From: Richard Fateman
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:55:56 -0800
On 11/12/2012 8:09 AM, Christian Stengg wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I use Maxima for automatically generating exercises for my students.
> For some type of exercise, Maxima produces a list of examples, e.g. a
> list of equations that should be solved by the students. I'd like to
> epxort these equations automatically for use in other applications,
> e.g. for presentation in a webbrowser or for insertion as pictures in
> some document or for filing in a database. Is it possible to get this
> done by Maxima? If yes, what different options are there?
>
> Thanks for your help,
> Christian
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> Maxima at math.utexas.edu
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Depending on your programming environment and your own abilities, the
most natural way
of exporting an expression in Maxima for re-use, is as a lisp symbolic
expression.
This can then be processed further in any program written in Lisp, and
for that matter,
it is fairly easy to parse a Lisp s-expression into some tree-like form
in any other language
that allows for constructing trees.
If all you want is Maxima to produce text or html, there are other ways
of doing that.
But if you expect the students' attempts at solving the problems to be
using the
computer in some way -- e.g. grading,
then you cannot really expect static text display to work very well.
In fact, it might as well be the case that you just print out the list
of equations on paper.
What is the point of using a web browser.
If you want to just paste equations as a picture, output in TeX works fine.
As for LaTeX, it is a superset of TeX and the output from Maxima can be
run directly
through LaTeX as well as TeX. There is no need to generate LaTeX-only
commands.
If you decide you want to run Lisp, you might also consider just using
the Lisp that
is already in Maxima. That is, write your presentation program, or
student exercise
program in Lisp, or even the Maxima language itself.
RJF