Mathematical typewriter emulation

This page is under construction.

What is MTE?

It is:

It is NOT:

It MAY:

Some details

MTE stands for "mathematical typewriter emulation". It is capable of doing what a mathematical typewriter (circa 1965) could do, no more no less. Materials can be prepared using MTE in roughly the amount of time required for creation on a mathematical typewriter (but less the time spent correcting errors on paper).

MTE files need to be filtered prior to printing. The filter needs to perform character-to-string substitutions (see my utility CONV) for conversion of individual "high ASCII" characters and certain "control characters" and to change a few ANSI escape sequences to the corresponding printer commands.

The demonstration items below were produced by converting screen images in which each character is represented by an 8 X 8 bitmap to GIF format. The GIF images are slightly grainy. The appearance of printed images (using matching fixed width fonts) depends on the quality and resolution of the printer fonts.


MTE Demos

The FIRST DEMO consists of about 25 lines of random mathematical statements. What is offered is:
a graphic image
of a micro-computer screen. The GIF image is slightly grainy due to enlargement. It was rendered on the micro-computer using an MTE viewer that
the raw MTE file,
which may be safely though not intelligibly viewed with Gnu Emacs. One wants an editor that

The SECOND DEMO is a review sheet for part of third semester calculus. Nothing useful will be obtained unless auto-loading of images (GIF) is turned on. The total size of the three images is about 18 kilobytes.


Symbol chart

MTE is useful only within a community where there is agreement on the set of available symbols and on the correspondence between the set of symbols and the set of computer codes that represent them.

This is an ASCII symbol chart (rows 0, 1, 8 and 9 have been left empty). In general, the symbol one sees in a given row and column depends very heavily on the configuration of one's terminal. However, where the Roman alphabet may be assumed, usually the assignments in rows 2 through 7 follow the ASCII standard.

It is obvious that the ordering of symbols in this chart for high codes is idiosyncratic and is not being proposed as a standard.

Graphic image of chart
made from the MTE viewer's rendering of a
MTE file
that contains one instance of each character.

Road closed beyond this point. Enter at your own risk.


Port Wanted

The key software item is the MTE reader called "efr" that I wrote for the Amiga desktop platform in 1989. It would be great if someone would volunteer to port this reader to X11. It should not be that difficult for someone familiar with X11 calls. Here is a primitive temporary link to a directory containing zoo archives of the source and the Amiga user package along with text files listing the zoo archive contents.
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