Thursday, April 10, 2008

Using Imaxima with Texlive in Gentoo Linux

Imaxima is an Emacs extension to interface with Maxima (see here for a nice tutorial). To use it, one need a LaTeX distribution. However with default Texlive installation in Gentoo, imaxima cannot work. Following is a sample session:

(%i1) integrate(x,x);
LaTex error in: \ifracn{x^{2}}{2}

The problem here is that there is another package breqn needed. Breqn is inlcuded in Texlive package texlive-mathextra, which is not installed when you emerge texlive. The package is also masked by default, therefore you need to unmask it before emerging. Following is a list of commands to install the package (substitute x86 with amd64 for x86-64 systems).

# echo "dev-texlive/texlive-mathextra ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge texlive-mathextra

After installation, fire up your Emacs and enjoy (I)maxima!

Update: if you are not comfortable with the default equation size (as in my case), you can add the following line into your .emacs (adjust the number to suit your own taste):

(setq imaxima-scale-factor 2.0)

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