[Axiom-developer] RE: tm_axiom

[Page, Bill]

Joris,

On Thursday, October 16, 2003 11:13 AM you wrote:
> 
> > Yes, it is old-fashioned. There have been discussions about
> > changing it and I believe several people on the list have
> > investigated it. Dylan has looked at it deeply enough to
> > understand where to patch simple things. There is also work
> > by Bill to look at the line-breaking algorithm as well as
> > discussion about embedding line-breaking into Axiom's tex
> > code.
> 
> I have looked a bit at Bill's intro too. It seems that the
> LaTeX generation has lots of problems. For instance, it even
> attempts to line break formulas at the interior of big
> parenthesis...

You are talking about the LaTeX generation of the line-break
routines that I inserted into the new version of tm_axiom,
right? If so, you are right that this line-break code has
only been properly tested on a subset of TeX/LaTeX output
produced by Axiom, enven though the "C" code is actually
quite old. As I understand from Tim and from the comments
in the code, it was written some years ago by Robert Sutor
(a primary Axiom developer) specifically to produce the
LaTeX output that became part of the Axiom Book.

> The TeXamcs-specific \* for multiplication is also missing.
> You should try to make the LaTeX generation as easy as
> possible and let TeXmacs do the formatting and line-breaking.
> 

I do not understand how to let TeXmacs do the line-breaking.
Without the line-break code that I inserted into tm_axiom,
TeXmacs seems to do exactly the same thing as LaTeX with the
long math lines - they just run off the page on the left.
Can you tell me how to get TeXmacs to break some long LaTeX
code that is passed through the plugin interface? Or where
should I read about this?

In general I agree that we should improve the TeX/LaTeX
generated by Axiom, but when I first tried this by submitting
a patch to get right of the \root{n} \of {x} horror, Tim
pointed out to me there are some "legacy" programs that
might be broken by such changes.

Cheers,
Bill Page.