I've toyed with maxima every few years, but I tend to get stymied at
some fairly simple things. This is pretty typical:
I have an equation I'd like to simplify to stick into some software:
sol_1: cx = -((b^2-1)*y2+(1-b^2)*y1-2*b*x2-2*b*x1)/(4*b)
(b^2-1) and 2*b are both have two terms in the denominator, but I can't
get maxima to combine them. Eg. what I want as the intermediate result is:
cx = -((b^2-1)*(y2-y1)-2*b*(x1+x2))/(4*b)
and to distribute the outer minus and divide out, giving:
cx = (x1+x2)/2 - (b^2-1)*(y2-y1)/(4*b)
Seems like this should be pretty straight-forward, but I can't seem to
get Maxima to do it.
I played around with substpart and trying to defrule something like
(p1-p2)*p3+(p2-p1)*p4 -> (p1-p2)*(p3-p4), but didn't get anywhere.