[Axiom-developer] TexFormat with latex output

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hi Tim, hi Eugene,

> Ralf is doing great work and I hate to see such discouraging feedback.

It's not (yet) discouraging at all at the moment.

There were several point that made me think.

1) Where is TexFormat actually used?
2) Don't break efricas way of showing rendered latex via
   \usepackage{preview} and dvipng.

Point (2) is rather easy to solve. And it's rather uninteresting by
which means. The only stability question is that it should work.

Point (1) is something, I cannot really answer. I use it to generate the
book form http://fricas.github.io/book.pdf, but otherwise Eugene's
comment "I would never use it", made me think.

TexFormat is not like the other formatters in the sense that there is
also a "latex: % -> String" function

http://fricas.github.io/api/SetCategory.html#l-set-category-latex

Well, that function is often just returning "not implemented" and
therefore not really useful, but somehow I doubt, that a user is going
the path  object -> OutputForm -> TexFormat -> String. I don't even see
how the last arrow would be performed. Would it be latex:TexFormat->String?

So I rather think that interfacing FriCAS to a nice frontend is the only
usecase. So I am asking people for what they use TexFormat.

Actually, neither \begin{pmatrix} nor \begin{array}{ccc} are flexible
enough for my taste. Remember, Franz Lehner rather wants bmatrix.
I'm going to produce a new environment that can be defined to the
respective need of the user.

Only then we have a stable interface from the FriCAS world to the TeX world.

Ralf