Re: [Gmath-devel] Mathematical Symbols

[Felix N. <fn...@gm...>]

Hassan Aurag <au...@cr...> writes:
>  This is a tough one. Ok, for now gmath's session is really a terminal
> session with some hopefully nice user layer.
> 
>  Think of it a Mathematica 1.0 but looking better. The next step for me
> is to leave this interface for terminal sessions, and write a new one.
> 
>  However for now, gnome/gtk text widgets are ugly and useless. I thought
> about the canvas but that would be too much work, and I don't want to do
> it.
> 
>  This simply means that I have to wait for gnome/gtk folks to finish
> writing pango. Pango is a niftier text widget with support for all kinds
> of input and for unicode.
> 
>  Again this means that when all is done, we would be able to display just
> about anything in those, including math symbols and such.  Otherwise, you
> need to write those symbols yourself or have the kind of resources
> Wolfram has to create Mathematica.
> 
>  So for now, think of GmatH, as a nice numerical simulation environment,
> where you can compute, visualize, save sessions, then use them as
> starting point for coding more complex stuff, soon code, debug ....
> 
>  We will take care of presentation later.

how about using TeX for this ?
Maybe an expression can have a context-menu with an option to display
it using TeX ?
or a terminal-command or both ?

This should be easy because TeX is very tree-like:
(x^2 + 7*x^2)/sin(x) => $\frac{x^2 + 7x^2}{\sin x}$
So you can just convert the expression-tree recursively.

the advantages are that you don't have to care about boxes and symbols and
you get a high-quality output. the disadvantage is that it takes a few
seconds to come up, so it is most probably not appropriate for
inline-graphics.

-- 
Felix Natter