I know this is a "tall order" (or a monumental task)....But there is a product called the Infty Reader (http://www.inftyproject.org/en/index.html) this very elegant OCR takes just about any Math/Engineering textbook and converts the page into a Latex format.

Now there are a lot of "academics" who just "love" LaTex, as it gives them some reason to become mired in a "line by line" programing language for the sake of creating "scientific" reports.

Fortunately there is a "cure" for that addiction, the Lyx project (http://www.lyx.org/) which gives us a GUI interface to LaTex, which not only enables "word processing" in Mathematical notation, but also puts out a LaTex file in a "format" that makes it much easier to work with...that the standard LaTex "text" run on style.

What I think would be DYNAMITE would be to develop a PATH which would go as this:

1. Complex Technical Document with Lots of Math

2. OCR work through Infty Reader to LATEX

3. Use of Lyx to clean up the Latex.

4. A converter to convert the Latex to SMATH format and/or (this can already be done through SMATH) into XMCD.


Interestingly this would:

A. Allow conversion of all high level, Math filled, academic texts and works to an instant usable format in SMATH and
MathCAD.

With the SM "executables" that would allow the making of SMATH independent executables to take the MATH lifted from the texts
and put it into the "useable Math Application" for any particular set of Math, Engineering Calculations, Statistic Cals, Graphing Calcs, Pure Math work, Physics Math, Biological Math, etc.

There is definitely a need for some tool chain for creating complex documents with integrated computer algebra capabilities.

Quite some solutions exist, if you do not insist on free 2D arrangement of math stuff:
Mathematica, Maxima, Python, Scientific Workplace have Notebook interfaces with at least output pretty-printing.
There is even an experimental interface between LyX and Maxima.

15 years ago I really enjoyed embedding Mathcad snippets in Word documents. That doesn't seem to be possible with nowaday's Mathcad Prime.

In LyX, it should be possible just on the config level, without any coding, to define an SMath inset, which upon double click opens a certain sm document and displays one or multiple screenshots, possibly generated with the snapshot region.

Then, double click on the displayed image would open the corresponding sm-document. That would really be great for editing the SMath handbook , which is written using LyX.

In general, I tend to vote for improving SMath in the direction of being a better pencil-and-paper replacement with the main benefit over other CAS systems that non-SMathicians can understand the content.

Don't forget texmacs. http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
Personnaly I would prefer it to lyx because it is wisiwig.As I don't know latex and don't want to learn it now, I think texmacs does it !
Texmacs has few valuable plugin :
session maxima session sage session python and more...

I think that any graphical text output format, whether LaTeX, TeX, MathML, etc., would be a great improvement. That superscripts and subscripts have the same text height is something that can be improved. Of course all of this should be ISO 80000-2:2009(E) compliant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_80000-2

I'm just a civil engineer and I would love to see SMath succeed. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to spend +$1500, for a piece of software, that is nothing more than a TI-89 on paper ($75 - $100 on eBay). But PTC can get away with it because visually, it currently happens to be better visually than SMath. I tried CompPad and I liked it, however, it is no longer under development. It used LibreOffice's/OpenOffice's OLE and it looked nice, but it was buggy, not dynamic and certainly not as well flesh out as SMath.

I'm new to SMath and I'm going to see if I can program it to do elliptical integrals. Civil engineers and land surveyors do need to calculate great circle distances (arc length of ellipse).

Nathan Selles-Alvarez, P.E.

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