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[Albrecht Gebhardt <address@hidden>]

Hi all,

I was searching if there is already some 
capture-the-plot-into-the-texmacs-document function available for Maxima (as 
it is for R, octave, gnuplot). It seems to be not.

So I decided to try some lisp coding:

;;
;; preliminary tmplot2d function, address@hidden
;;
(defun $tmplot2d (&rest args)
  ($set_plot_option '((mlist) $gnuplot_term $ps))
  ($set_plot_option '((mlist) $gnuplot_out_file "/tmp/tmplot.eps"))
  (apply '$plot2d args)
  (write (concatenate 'string (vector (code-char 2)) "ps" ":")
         :escape nil :readably nil)
  ; TODO: something like this
  ;(setq plotfile (open "/tmp/tmplot.eps"))
  ;(format t "%s" (read plotfile)) 
  ;; ^^ should be a while loop until EOF.. don't know how to do 
  ;(close plotfile)
  ; workaround:
  (system "cat /tmp/tmplot.eps")
  (write (concatenate 'string (vector(code-char 5)))
         :escape nil :readably nil)
  ($set_plot_option '((mlist) $gnuplot_term $default))
  ($set_plot_option '((mlist) $gnuplot_out_file nil))
  (print "plot done")))


Put this into plugins/maxima/lisp/texmacs-maxima-5.9.1.lisp and then in a 
Maxima session call e.g.

tmplot2d(sin(x), [x, -%Pi, %Pi]);

instead of 

plot2d(sin(x), [x, -%Pi, %Pi]);

It's not perfect, the plot is to large, the function should restore the plot 
options instead of resetting them to default afterwards, but maybe someone 
with more lisp, maxima and texmacs knowledge can inmprove it?

I tested it with the Debian sarge packages of texmacs and maxima (that means 
maxima runs with GCL, don't know if my lisp code is GCL specific)

I first tried a variant without redirecting output to file:
(write (concatenate 'string (vector (code-char 2)) "ps" ":")
(apply '$plot2d args)
(write (concatenate 'string (vector(code-char 5)))

it works too, but if you generate some syntax error in the $plot2d call 
(wrong 
range or so) then it hangs (because the error message gets captured between
\0x02ps:  ....  \0x05.

Albrecht

-- 
// Albrecht Gebhardt          Tel.: (++43 463) 2700/3118
// Institut fuer Mathematik   Fax : (++43 463) 2700/3198
// Universitaet Klagenfurt    mailto:address@hidden
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