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☿

Translating Michel Gosse's book to eev (2026)

1. Introduction
2. A first demo (with GNUPlot)
3. Try it!
4. The video


1. Introduction

In 2026sep13 Michel Gosse sent an e-mail to the Maxima mailing list announcing his "Guide to Differential Equations with Maxima (Maxima via Examples volume 3)" - It's a short guide, but I will call it a "book".

I'm with a lot of free time because this hasn't been resolved yet, and I sent to Michel an e-mail about "translating his book to eev" - in the sense of making his examples run in the "ugly interface" that I explained in my presentation at the EmacsConf 2024, starting at 0:42 - and I included a screenshot and a short video of a prototype. He answered quickly & very enthusiastically, and I started working on the things in the following sections.


2. A first demo (with GNUPlot)

The first two screenshots below show my translation of the code in the Section 4 of the book. Compare that with what I've shown in my presentation at the EmacsConf 2024 between 1:06 and 1:20; the window at the left shows my script, the window at the right has a terminal running Maxima inside Emacs, and the draw2d command ran GNUPlot. The second screenshot shows what happens when we run a `find-gossegdem3page'; in that screenshot the window at the right shows a page of the book, and that lets us compare the plots.

The page in the second screenshot is hard to read because the letters are tiny - in that screenshot I'm using a PDF viewer that is not the one that I use by default, and the third screenshot shows how I use `find-pdf-page-links' to select which pdf viewer to use; see here.

The first elisp hyperlink below points to the Section 4 in Gosse's book, and the second points to my translation of that section:

(find-angg "MAXIMA/2026-gosse.mac" "4-solving")
(find-gossegdem3page 6 "4 Solving an ODE with ode2...")


3. Try it!

If you don't have any idea of what this is, but you have Emacs, I recommend starting by these two other places:

This translation is a spin-off of the "REPL for learning SVG".

Each section of the translation starts with two links to the corresponing section in the book - a link to a page of the PDF and a like to that page converted to text; see here - and then it has some Maxima code 

(find-pdf-like-intro "4. Hyperlinks to pages of PDF files")
(find-pdf-like-intro "4. Hyperlinks to pages of PDF files" "text")
(find-pdf-like-intro "7. Shorter hyperlinks to PDF files")
(find-psne-intro "1. Local copies of files from the internet")

...this section was inspired by my page on "a REPL for SVG". The "REPL for SVG" was an attempt to motivate lots of people to try eev, and it didn't have any prerequisites besides Emacs; but to run my translation of Gosse's book...

  • you need to be on a Unix-based system,
  • you need Maxima installed,
  • and you need to understand:

So here my target audience is much smaller.

The recommended way to run the translation is with `find-wget'. If you have maxima-mode installed, use the first sexp below; if not, use the second.

(find-wget-mode '(maxima-mode) "http://anggtwu.net/MAXIMA/2026-gosse.mac")
(find-wget "http://anggtwu.net/MAXIMA/2026-gosse.mac")


4. The video