[OS X TeX] Re: Publicon today

[Themis Matsoukas]

> On 3/12/06 at 3:43 PM, matsoukas at psu.edu (Themis Matsoukas) wrote:
>
>> I also use Mathematica a lot but, while I find it's math
>> capabilities impressive, I give it a rating of extremely poor in
>> its integration with other programs.  Its tex support is equally
>> poor, for example, TeXForm[a + 2.0 x + x^2] produces
>> x^2+\text{2.$\grave{ }$} x+a (notice that the order of the terms
>> has changed, not to mention the lunacy of \text{...}).

On Mar 12, 2006, at 6:04 PM, Bill Rowe wrote:
> There are two separate issues here. The order of the terms has  
> changed due to the way Mathematica evaluates expressions.  
> Mathematica puts an expression in a standard order before doing  
> further evaluation. If you simply type a + 2.0 x + x^2 into  
> Mathematica you will see it returns the same expression with the  
> terms re-ordered. That is the re-ordering issue has nothing to do  
> with TexForm.

In Mathematica 5.2 if you type "a + 2.0 x +  x^2" the result is "a +  
2.0 x +  x^2". The order changes when TeXForm is used.  Mathematica  
can use whatever evaluation rules it wishes but one would think that  
TeXForm should _not_ call for evaluation but for literal output.

Themis

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