[Axiom-developer] Re: axiom--book--1--patch-9 fails to compile

[root]

Bertfried,

>> You don't have to build all of Axiom. You just need the code for
>> extracting the book.tex from the book.pamphlet file. Thus, you
>> should be able to do:
>>
>> cd axiom
>> make start                 <=== this makes the document command
>> cd src/doc
>> document book              <=== this extracts book.tex then latex book.tex
>
>OK, this worked out. It gave a warning "no root <<*>> defined" or such but
>actually TeXed the book.
>       "> make" did even produce an AXIOM, just for curiosity I tried it
>and it came up with build date March 2 2004, so its new. It computes, but
>I don't know what is broken. It compiled for several hours (PIII 700MHz)
>without problems, but I had to leave at 11pm the institute, which is
>required for security reasons (@#$%#$#!!), so I cannot tell when it failed.

you should be able to run make on a partial build and it will restart
from where it stopped.

>
>Q1:    If I would like to make changes to the book, how to proceed,
>change it locally and send you a diff or writing a file which explains
>what to change (work for you, most likely bad)

at the moment just send me the 

   diff -Naur (myversion.tex) (yourversion.tex)

and I'll merge them. The long term plan is to allow direct
edits to the file. First I have to figure out how to make
the arch server version writeable. 

>Q2:    Is there a policy for the TeX? I saw very very outdated TeX
>commands like \root{x}\of{y} and \over and such things which seriously
>interfere with newer TeX and LaTeX standards. Should there be \mathbb
>fonts for real, complex numbers etc.

The TeX is standard TeX although not used much these days.
The \root{x}\of{y} form is actual Axiom output. You can see this
output by typing

  )set output tex on

at the Axiom console and then typing an equation.
We need to consider updating the TeX generator in Axiom.
Bill, David, and Joris have already complained about it.
It's on the list of things to do.

>
>Q3:    Main question, is it possible to pipe files through axiom, so that
>is reads from a file and writes its (TeX) output into a file? Maple has eg
>a switch -l which allows to process files and maple interprets only code
>inbetween special \begin{mapleinput}...\\end{mapleoutput} tags. It would
>be really exquisite to have such a facility and to use AXIOM to produce
>(most of) the book itself.  
.....(snip).....

The entries in the book ARE actual output from Axiom.
Every Axiom command is surrounded by a
  \spadcommand{  }
TeX command and the output from Axiom has been pasted
back into the book. In fact, in the past the book's output
was generated this way and I have broken this facility.
Future plans will bring this back but in a much different
form that uses literate programming for uniformity.

Tim