[Axiom-developer] Re: [Axiom-mail] Two beginner questions

[Martin Rubey]

"Alasdair McAndrew" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Martin,
> 
> Thanks so much for your detailed reply!  So - I'm using Axiom in TeXmacs.
> Without starting a new instance of Axiom from another shell, how do I access
> HyperDoc?  

Oh, HyperDoc does not appear when started from within Axiom? I'd call that a
bug. (I'm not using TeXmacs, anybody out there who knows?)

However, it is not so inconvenient as you might think.  When Axiom is doing a
big calculation, HyperDoc becomes unresponsive.  Thus I often start a second
Axiom, to do some browsing while I let Axiom compute.  Maybe you want to write
a tiny shell script like

## call this file axiom and put it into your private ~/bin directory ##########
#! /bin/bash

$AXIOM/bin/axiom
$AXIOM/bin/axiom $@
###############################################################################

(i.e., first start axiom without any parameters, which you will use for
HyperDoc browsing, then start the "real" axiom process, which TeXmacs will
use.)

> And how do Windows users get their Axiom help?

They don't :-(.  It's too sad, but we have not found a programmer who is either

* willing to port HyperDoc to MS Windows (HyperDoc relies on X)

or

* willing to write a HyperDoc replacement as outlined in
  http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/SummerOfCode2007 and many many long email
  discussions.

If you have somebody handy, please tell me immediately.  We can even pay a
(very) symbolic amount of money.  If he decides today (deadline is April 11),
he probably can do it as a Summer of Code project and earn 4500$.  In this case
he should apply here:

http://lispnyc.org/soc.clp

and mention Martin Rubey as (inofficial) co-mentor.

Martin