RE: [Axiom-developer] hyperlinked algebra

[Bill Page]

On December 9, 2005 12:29 PM Tim Daly (root) wrote:

> ... 
> actually the latest "grand scheme" is related to Bill's question
> about parents/children. we could certainly hack up a routine in
> lisp or aldor that, given a domain, could spit out the 
> parent/siblings/children and then dynamically create the file
> containing the graph. thus a user could point at a domain and ask
> for the graph.

Yes! I am very interested in this. It could become a graphical
viewer/navigator for the Axiom database. I would be great to have
this work through a web browser and available on the Axiom wiki.

> 
> the layout is a challenge though. laying out endpaper took 
> about 4 days.
> 

For layout I think we should depend on automatic graph layout
software such as GraphViz

http://www.graphviz.org

I works surprizing well.

We already have GraphViz on MathAction

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/GraphViz

and there is an extension for LaTeX that processes GraphViz
commands. There are apparently several ways to add hyperref-like
links to these graphics in LaTeX but I have not had time yet to
try any of these.

I have just been waiting for the little extra time I would
need to key in the GraphViz specification for the graphs in
the endpaper.pamphlet file to see what kind of layout it will
produce automatically. GraphViz is very simple to use for
simple graphs and has more sophisticated options for more
sophisticated graphs.

For graphs that are displayed in an HTML page, GraphViz has
the ability to automatically create image maps that make the
graph clickable with hyperlinks in both nodes and edges.

Regards,
Bill Page.