[OS X TeX] Re: Publicon today

[Bill Rowe]

On 3/12/06 at 7:47 PM, matsoukas at psu.edu (Themis Matsoukas) wrote:

>>On 3/12/06 at 3:43 PM, matsoukas at psu.edu (Themis Matsoukas) wrote:

>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. 

This simply isn't accurate for my installation of Mathematica. In a fresh session I see 

In[1]:= a + 2.*x + x^2
Out[1]= x^2 + 2.*x + a

with version 5.2 running on Mac OS 10.4.5

>Mathematica can use whatever evaluation rules it wishes but one
>would think that TeXForm should _not_ call for evaluation but for
>literal output.

You can make Mathematica behave this way. But if if behaved this way for TeXForm by default that would require expressions to be evaluated differently in TeXForm than what is standard in Mathematica. And in general you don't want this behavior since that would mean statements like TeXForm[%] would print out a literal % in TeX rather than evaluating the previous cell and printing the results in TeX.

Again, this particular issue has nothing to do with TeXForm it is a design characteristic of Mathematica.
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