# [SciPy-user] python+maxima+latex for symbolic stuff

Ryan Krauss ryanlists at gmail.com
Sat Nov 19 12:07:25 CST 2005

I could work on screen shots but I don't know if they would be
terribly interesting.  What is does primarily is allow very clean
LaTeX-symbolic integration.  I really like including explanations in
my derivations and I like looking at pretty LaTeX output because it
helps me spot errors when I am looking at well formatted output
instead of the kind of command line output that is typical of computer
algebra programs.

Maybe I should have made clearer that it doesn't actually provide any
computer algebra functionality that isn't already in Maxima.  It just
changes the interface so that instead of working with Maxima or
Xmaxima directly, you write a LaTeX-like file so that you can do
something like:

This is some explanation of my equation
\begin{maxima}
eq1:x+y=2
\end{maxima}
This is some comment after my equation.

So it is sort of a literate programming approach to LaTeX and symbolic
stuff.  Python takes what is in the \begin{maxima}..\end{maxima} and
passes it to Maxima, Python then replaces the maxima environment with

This is some explanation of my equation
$$output for Maxima$$.
This is some comment after my equation.

Perhaps not rocket science, but I really like my derivations to be
done in LaTeX and I don't like the Maxima user interface very much.

So, if I had screen shots, they would show a LaTeX input file, a
Python script that goes between LaTeX and Maxima and then a pretty
LaTeX output.

It really should be painless to download and install and it is very
small (80kb).  This was my first distutils experience.  Any comments
on whether it installed as expected?

Ryan

On 11/18/05, lanceboyle at bluebottle.com <lanceboyle at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Could someone provide a couple screen shots of this set-up and a
> description of what it does and so on? I'd like to know a bit more
> before I install everything.
>
> Jerry
>
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