mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Hi,

> I have started working on a TeXmacs interface for 
> GNU Octave.

This would be a *very* valuable contribution, also because
during discussions on a (private :^( ) Red Hat mailing list,
we were told that the probablilty of TeXmacs being included
into the standard distribution would significantly grow
if we had a good interface with GNU Octave.

> Octave's CLI is pretty flexible and I have
> it working inside TeXmacs by sending a few 
> appropriate controls to TeXmacs prior to invoking
> octave with a specially hacked PS1 prompt string.
> 
> It works well. 
> 
> Anyhow, rather than patching GNU Octave to output
> TeXmacs controls, I'll be implementing special 
> routines in Octave code to generate TeXmacs output. 
> 
> This means that to get a "pretty printed" matrix,
> you'll have to do something like:
> 
> octave> texprint(M); 
> 
> "Raw" matrix display works as normal. 
> 
> My reason for doing it this way is two-fold:
> 
> First, its easier than trying to get up to speed 
> on Octave's large C++ code base just to replace the
> console code.
> 
> But, moreover, Octave will NEED functions to
> communicate with TeXmacs, execute Scheme expressions,
> etc. This is the core functionality that I'll be
> coding. 
> 
> Down the road, in phase two I'll pay more mind to
> having Octave pretty print by default. 

Indeed, if you *have* a routine for (La)TeX-printing,
then you may wish to use this routine by default
if you know that Octave was called from TeXmacs.
The easiest solution would be to convince to the Octave
maintainers to support a --texmacs option and to include
the necessary code directly into Octave. If this is not possible,
then you may also write appropriate filters, like Andrey Grozin
has done for some computer algebra systems (see the TeXmacs sources).
It might be interesting for you to directly discuss some of these
issues with Andrey (grozin a t texmacs.org).

Best wishes, Joris


-----------------------------------------------------------
Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>
http://www.texmacs.org: GNU TeXmacs scientific text editor
http://www.math.u-psud.fr/~vdhoeven: personal homepage
-----------------------------------------------------------