Re: [Axiom-developer] Book, other questions

[root]

CY,

I have no plans to publish a paper copy but it's open source so
anyone can publish it. I do have plans to break it up and restructure
it so that it fits into the long term plans but that won't happen for
quite a while. The short term plan is to finish the current review
(to fix up the remaining issues) and then move on to getting the
graphics back to life, followed by hypertex, aldor, openmath, and the
numeric library support. At which point "axiom" will exist with the
capabilities it used to have but will have been rebuilt to fit the 
new, long term directions.

As for printing, I find that dvips has a couple useful options.
I can print it two-sided (on a single-sided laser printer (about
3 inches thick)) and print smaller sections of it by:

  dvips -A -pp 100-200 -r book.dvi    <== print even pages 100-200
  (reload the pages into the feeder)
  dvips -B -pp 100-200 book.dvi    <== print odd pages 100-200

notes: -A and -B specify even-only or odd-only pages
       -pp specifies a page range
       -r  stacks the pages in reverse order (so you don't have to
           restack the pages before putting them back into the printer)


You can get a source-only distribution by just doing:

cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/projects/axiom login
cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/projects/axiom co axiom
tar -zcf axiom.tgz axiom

which will download the lastest version and tar up the directory.
I'm not sure what other packaging constraints Gentoo has as I've
never used that distro.

I tried to build axiom on a BSD system but failed. BSD uses old-style
make and the commands are not gnu-compatible. It's a goal to get
axiom running everywhere, including BSD, but my week-long attempt failed.
I also tried to get it to run on Apple's OS-X which is BSDish and failed
again. My years-old Unix skills have been badly mangled by Gnu-ish versions.
I'll make a sustained effort at some point but not in the near future.

If you're having trouble with building axiom I recommend that you
build it in an emacs shell, save the console output, and send it
to me. That way I can see what happened. 

Tim