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Rubber and Rubber Balloons: Paradigms of Thermodynamics ?
ASCII-art Math
Posted on June 9, 2012 by Yrogirg
Many of computer algebra systems date back to the times when
GUI machines were rare and expensive, if were present at all.
Thus command line was a standard interface. Unfortunately text
terminal doesn?t fit very well for displaying mathematical
expressions which demand for rich typesetting. To represent
math formulas CAS?s resorted to some kind of ASCII art:
inf 1
==== / n n
\ [ x log (x)
> I ---------- dx
/ ] gamma(n x)
==== /
n = 0 0
That?s the output of Maxima. Some of the systems went further
and don?t restrict themselves to plain ASCII. Axiom can produce
such a nice output:
Even now most CAS?s retain command line interface, for example
Mathematica 8?s terminal session:
In[14]:= Pi*(a+b^2/(Exp[12]+3/2 ">2))
2
b
Out[14]= (a + -------) Pi
3 12
- + E
2
The same technique was also spread in Usenet see whim.org for a
collection of notes some of which appeared at sci.math. I was
even able to find ?Guidelines for Using ASCII to Write
Mathematics?.
If you are looking for a standalone application to render LaTeX
to ASCII the only one I?ve found is tex2mail, more than a
decade old Perl script. Much water has flowed under the bridge
since then and old character encodings were replaced by
Unicode, namely UTF-8. Unicode provides lot?s of math-related
symbols and naturally one wants to employ this abundant to
allow for prettier output of math formulas in terminal.
I?ve tried to enhance tex2mail by turning it to tex2unicode. To
some extent I?ve succeeded:
????????
??? 3 4 ? 2 6 4
? \?a x ??? 3 x \?1 - x + x - 3 x
? ????????? dx = \?a ??????????????????????????????????
? ???????? ????????
? 2 ? 2 ? ? 2 2
\?1 - x ? 3 x - 12 ? \?1 - x - 9x + 12
? 1 ?n
lim ? 1 + ? ? = e
n --> oo ? n ?
n n
?1 x ???oo ?1 x (log x)
? x dx = > ? ?????????? dx.
?0 ???n=0 ?0 n!
Unfortunately things turned out to be more complicated with
other LaTeX commands. The problem is that some symbols like ???
should be wider than others. It undermines the whole concept of
monospace formatted output. To make things worse the output
depends both on the font and the software. Gedit and gnome
terminal treat the same string differently. Actually the only
reliable symbols to enrich ASCII art are form box-drawing
Unicode block.
Making a long story short. Since I don?t really need a full
featured LaTeX-to-Monospace-Unicode renderer, I?ll just post
what I did by now:
TeX2Unicode Perl script
If you are not content with certain LaTeX commands, for example
?\otimes? or ?\to? it is really easy to improve them. So don?t
hesitate and adjust it for your needs. The license is whatever
it was for tex2mail.in file in PARI/GP project, where I took it
from. I guess it is GPLv2.
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? SklogWiki
Rubber and Rubber Balloons: Paradigms of Thermodynamics ?
7 Responses to ASCII-art Math
1. [31b] Sam Alexander says:
June 10, 2012 at 08:30
Those are really beautiful, very nice work :)
Having grown up browsing sci.math, ASCII math seems like
the most natural thing in the world to me, and I can hardly
imagine ASCII math *not* being part of a mathematician?s
arsenal: how do you write emails to colleagues without
ascii math?
Reply
2. [e6e] Joseph Nebus says:
June 10, 2012 at 08:49
Reblogged this on nebusresearch and commented:
I had forgotten the challenges of doing more than the most
basic mathematics expressions in ASCII art, and had
completely forgotten there were tools that tried to make it
a bit easier. Enteropia here?s put forth a script which
ought to make it a bit easier to go from LaTeX into an
ASCII representation, and I have the feeling I?m going to
want to find this again later on, so I?d best make some
kind of link I can locate when I do.
Reply
3. [752] The S I says:
June 21, 2012 at 09:41
Very interesting stuff!
Reply
4. [100] wahrsagevogel says:
September 24, 2013 at 10:57
The link for the script is dead, could you provide a new
one? Thank you!
Reply
+ [bcf] Yrogirg says:
September 25, 2013 at 08:47
Done, though quickly, so check if it actually works,
not sure that was the right version.
Reply
5. [dc4] univerio says:
October 28, 2014 at 06:57
Unfortunately the link is dead again. Could you perhaps
post it to GitHub?
Reply
+ [bcf] Yrogirg says:
October 29, 2014 at 09:40
You can try the link again.
Reply
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