aMath

GNU Emacs minor mode to create ASCII math formula using GNU Maxima.

amath-mode.el

developped and tested under GNU Emacs 23 snapshot.

Original Proposal

When using imaxima/imath-mode, I find a similar feature is also useful, namely an imath-mode outputing ASCII-art (display2d:true for maxima) maths to an editing buffer, in the follow ways.

1. Under a text console, with no embedded graphics, ASCII-art is a good alternative for editing plain text file with bore 1D formulas.
2. When composing an email (which is good to use plain text for compatibility, where embedded inline graph is filtered by many MUA), ASCII-art formula is more readable than self-defined description or (pseudo-)LaTeX.
3. When coding, e.g. C/Fortran/Python, adding comments of ASCII-art formulas is convenient and cool.

it is not hard to implement such feature. I can see that when C-c ! in imath-mode buffer a section of {latex ... latex} is generated from maxima process. We can just change display:imaxima to display:true in the sub maxima process and create a new section of {aa ... aa} to place the output ASCII-art formulas.