On 2013-02-08, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
> If Maxima is running on an underlying Common Lisp which already
> supports the UTF character sets, then it should be possible for
> Maxima to support Greek characters "without any additional work"
> (or, at least without any additional code).
Yes, Maxima + UTF-8-aware Lisp + UTF-8 terminal => happiness. I've tried it.
The only problem, so far as I can tell, is that combining characters
which occur in some languages (i.e. there are multiple character objects
which are displayed as a single glyph or whatever you want to call it)
confuse the pretty printer, since their size on the display isn't any
simple function of the number of characters.
Most Lisp varieties handle UTF-8 these days; the only one that doesn't,
so far as I know, is GCL. There may be others.
However, for user interfaces other than terminals, it is also necessary
for the display code to understand UTF-8. I don't know if that's the
case for wxMaxima or XMaxima.
best,
Robert Dodier