Blog on project documentation

For those interested in project management, check out my new blog on internal project documentation @ blog.draw.systems.

3D plots in Reinteract

Using matplotlib's awesome mplot3d toolkit. Note that this all uses cairo and so will print nicely.

Progress

What's new since my last post? Well, I did write Python bindings for Lasem. Note that Lasem from git master is needed for pylasem to work (many thanks to Emmanuel Pacaud for being quick to review my patches).

I've also more or less finished up the sympy module for Reinteract (kudos to Robert Schroll for helpful suggestions and code). A release is pending on feedback from the Reinteract maintainer on how to implement the actual integration best.

Another little hack in my Reinteract branch is support for printing worksheets using GtkPrint.

SymPy + Reinteract + Lasem = ♛

Lasem is an SVG and MathML rendering library that also handles itex. What is really cool about it is that it uses cairo. This means that we need no more calls to dvipng when rendering sympy output! It is also fast and handles matrices:



The second prize in coolness goes to the mathtex project, which allows one to render latex using straight python and cairo.

I have code integrating both mathtex and lasem into sympy + reinteract. Neither is ready enough to be released at this point, but soon they will be. Stay tuned!

SymPy + Reinteract = ♥

Part of what makes SymPy so useful is the fact that it can readily be combined with any other Python software. Nevertheless I sometimes find myself wishing for a better interactive shell, where one can go back and edit previous statements. Reinteract is the obvious candidate and the only thing that kept me back was its lack of support for SymPy's "pretty printing". Now I've just found a bit of time to combine the two:


The drawback of using LaTeX is that for every formula an external program has to be invoked. This can become slow for large worksheets, and so I've experimented with embedding GtkMathView as well. GtkMathView currently breaks when scrolling the Reinteract text view, but I'm sure this can be fixed. Otherwise it works well enough for a screenshot:


Both are quite horrible hacks currently but I promise to polish. Thus far I offer (incomplete) Python bindings for GtkMathView and a Reinteract branch. The LaTeX formatter makes use of latexmath2png.py.