Suppose you wanted to format a nifty math equation for insertion into plain old ordinary email, or maybe as a comment in your C program. For instance, something reasonably complex like this rendition of the series used in the BBP algorithm to compute hexidecimal digits of pi:
oo
=====
__ \ / 4 2 1 1 \ -n
|| = > |------- - ------- - ------- - -------| 16
/ \8 n + 1 8 n + 4 8 n + 5 8 n + 6/
=====
n = 0
It would be pretty tedious, right? Well, perhaps you could use this linke to aamath, a nifty command line program for rendering ascii art versions of math formulas.
That’s a great util’, thanks.
Long ago I used to use Maple to do the same thing, but my copy is only licensed for Win32 and the nice people at Maple refused to convert my licence over to Linux without having to re-purchase the whole thing. 🙁
Octave (et al) are great, so I don’t really miss Maple, but it was the first computer algebra package I learnt on, so sometimes I wish I could run it on my workstation.