On 2013-01-01, Johan Ekh <ekh.johan at gmail.com> wrote:
> here comes a newbie question. I'd like to use symbols like "\Delta u" in
> mathematical expressions. It seems that maxima treats the above as two
> separate symbols but I'd like it to be a single symbol. Is this possible?
Well, you can customize the LaTeX output; see 'texput'.
texput (Delta_u, "\\Delta u");
tex (sqrt (1 + Delta_u));
=> $$\sqrt{\Delta u+1}$$
Note that the symbol in Maxima is still Delta_u. If you want Maxima to
parse "Delta u" as an operator Delta applied to an argument u, you can
declare Delta as a prefix operator:
prefix ("Delta");
foo : Delta u;
[op (foo), args (foo)];
=> [Delta, [u]]
sqrt (1 + Delta u);
=> sqrt(Delta u + 1)
texput ("Delta", "\\Delta ", prefix);
tex (sqrt (1 + Delta u));
=> $$\sqrt{\Delta u+1}$$
Hope this helps,
Robert Dodier