authoring math documents (tex?)

[Jim Kuzdrall]

On Monday 11 June 2007 18:38, Lloyd Kvam wrote:
> My daughter is heading back to school and will need to write Math
> papers.  She is now running Fedora 6.  (The conversion from Windows
> to Fedora happened after graduation.)  She asked me what software she
> should use for writing her Math papers, and being an old ascii text
> guy, I did not know what to tell her.
>
> Looking through the available packages I saw
>         TeXmacs
>         openoffice.org-math
> among others.

    I write a lot of math papers - or rather, papers with a lot of math 
in them.  There are two ways I do it.

    Most of us doing math these days use Maple, Mathcad, Mathematical, 
or some similar symbolic math program to do the tedious algebraic 
grinding.  I happen to use Macsyma for Win98 (a much enhanced GUI 
version of the Unix command line program) which puts out answers in 
nice mathematical pretty print.  After exporting the output to pdf, I 
use Kpdf to extract the output results I want as an image to show in 
the report.  Just put copy your selection box to the clipboard and 
"special paste" it into OO.

    Macsyma Inc went under years ago, but I assume the current symbolic 
math programs will "print" results to pdf also.

    In the less common situation where I just want to show a 
mathematical relationship that contains calculus (such as the Planck 
blackbody radiation integral), the math feature of OpenOffice works 
fine.

    It might help to play around with the OO math features a bit over 
the summer, but I think she will find the professor requesting that all 
students use one of the symbolic math packages to both solve the 
problems and do the report.

    The right reasoning and solution should count a lot more than the 
pretty printing, but you never know these days.

Jim Kuzdrall