RE: [Aimmath-developers] AIM and Maple 9 not good news

[Greg G. <gr...@ma...>]

On Wednesday, 23 July 2003 4:41 AM, Jon wrote: 
> Hello all,
> 
> I had reported earlier that Maple 9 on OS X was giving Maple to LaTeX 
> errors. Well, I just installed Maple 9 on my production AIM server 
> (Windows 2000) and got the same Maple to LaTeX errors. 
> ...
> I am not sure where the error is. I haven't been able to figure out if 
> Maple 9 has changed how it handles LaTeX or if there is a Maple 
> programming change that needs to be made in AIM. ...

Hi Jon,

When you first reported these problems on OS X, I suspected that the
problems were due to changes in Maple. The LaTeX function in AIM, as
I understand it, is a re-engineered version of the latex (all lowercase)
function of Maple. The problem with the native latex function of Maple
is the output is not a string ... it is just printed to the output
(which can be to the terminal or to a file). 

It would be helpful, I think, if you tried using the latex and LaTeX
functions directly, i.e. start an interactive maple session in the
WEB-INF/maple directory and do:

> read "Console.mpl";

and then try using the functions latex and LaTeX on some maths
objects, e.g.

> latex(int(x^2*sin(x), x = Pi/4 .. Pi/2));
\pi +1/32\,{\pi }^{2}\sqrt {2}-\sqrt {2}-1/4\,\pi \,\sqrt {2}
> LaTeX(int(x^2*sin(x), x = Pi/4 .. Pi/2));
        "\pi +1/32\,{\pi }^{2}\sqrt {2}-\sqrt {2}-1/4\,\pi \,\sqrt {2}"

I suspect that the LaTeX command will just give some horrible error
message, but it may help in diagnosing what's going wrong. You might
also look at the documentation for the latex command. Do:

> ?latex

... and see if there is any mention of what's been newly added there
in Maple 9. It would be very interesting, if, for example, Maple 9
had an extra option which allowed the output of latex to be a string.
This is an excerpt of the Maple 8 documentation for latex:

- The function latex produces output as a side-effect, and returns
  NULL as the function value. Therefore the ditto commands, % and %%,
  will not recall the LaTeX output.

If, in Maple 9, there were to be an extra option then it might also be
the cause of the failure of the LaTeX command, but then we wouldn't
need the LaTeX command (except possibly for a few minor changes) in
Maple 9 and could replace it with latex and the the new option.
Anyway, enough speculation ... I hope the above helps a little in 
tracking down the problem. 

  Regards,
  Greg