I doubt that Maple is a reasonable solution--too expensive and too
cumbersom a process. What offers more hope is something that the 'evil
empire' Microsoft has offered for quite a while RFT (or RTF can never
remember) which stands for Richly Formatted Text. Users of Micro$oft
e-mail software (they have quite a nice package called Internet Mail that
is free--just download it) can exchange e-mail that includes differenct
fonts, bold, italics, colors, and I think non-ascii symbols and super/sub
scripts. The e-mail reader automatically displays these with no further
user manipulation.
The problem is, for non-RFT readers, one gets an attachment of what looks
like gibberish to the end of the message. There have been wars over this
on other listserves, but I think some non-M$ vendors have started to
provide RFT support.
Since I have seen none of the gibberish in the Digests (which normally
can't decode this stuff) and because with the number of respondents on the
list, at least of few of which might not even know that this option might
be turned on, I suspect the Listserve automatically filters the
attachments--leaving plain Ascii text. Anyway, if members communicate with
each other, using Exchange, Outlook, Microsoft Mail, or Microsoft Internet
Mail (on both ends), they should be able to exchange fully formatted and
complexly formatted messages. I suspect eventually such will become the
standard across the whole e-mail world.
Rick
-----------------------------------------
From: Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>
{Sorry for this long post, but please bear with it to pick up the
notation.}
I couldn't bear it, and that is sad, because though I haven't contributed
to this thread I might like to, and I don't like to discard a colleague's
contribution just because I - can't bear it.
I enter here to offer a solution made evident to me yesterday by John
Mallinckrodt. I privately requested from him a Maple notebook, expecting
he would forward a file to me by email. Instead he copied Maple statements
into his emeil reply to me, and I pasted them back into Maple. It solves
any file transfer problems very neatly (though I doubt there would have
been any). It was dead easy to copy and paste the email statements into
Maple, and after I did so, PrettyPrint made everything crystal clear.
Now I know some people who email in TeX. I find it difficult to read. I
think Maple might present a better alternative.
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Richard W. Tarara
Department of Chemistry & Physics Free Physics & Energy Instructional
Software
Saint Mary's College available at:
Notre Dame, IN 46556
219-284-4664 http://estel.uindy.edu/aapt/rickt/software/
rtarara@saintmarys.edu http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/mirrors/tarara/
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