Hi Rob, I'm CC'ing Thomas Coffee and Murat Yildizoglu, who as the wiki says did a lot of work on the SAGE module. They might be interested in your experience.
On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 12:11 PM, Rob Oakes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Scott, > > On Wed, 2012-10-03 at 06:16 -0400, Scott Kostyshak wrote: > >> I've been meaning to checkout SAGE + LyX so if no one comes along to >> help you I might take a look. > > I appreciate the offer. After some quality time looking into how the > module works and how SageTeX processes documents, I was able to get it > up and running. I found this page to be extremely helpful: > http://www.sagemath.org/doc/tutorial/sagetex.html Great! Good job figuring it out. > Of course, like all things, I was hoping to get a quick response via the > list. I decided last year that I wanted to go back to school to improve > my mechanical engineering skills and was hoping to get Sage working for > a lab report. > > (Why I decided more education would be desirable is completely beyond > me. I've forgotten how thoroughly miserable it is to be a student. While > I frequently have to work late, it's been years since I've had to pull > an all-night session to finish homework. It's every bit as bad as I > remember. It might even be worse, if you factor in age.) I bet that it's really difficult to do what you're doing. Hopefully there are some fun things about being a student again that will surprise you. How about coming home after turning your homework in and crashing on your bed -- that must have felt nice at least :). Best of luck with your challenge! >> How did you install SAGE? In the past >> I've compiled from source which was very smooth but took a while. >> There is also a PPA: https://launchpad.net/~aims/+archive/sagemath > > To get Sage installed, I used the PPA. I thought about compiling from > source so that I could integrate it with the system Python, and then > thought better of it. The installation from the PPA was quick and I > haven't had any issues, so far. Glad to hear. > To install the SageTeX module (which has to be done separately from > installing Sage), I copied the sagetex folder into my LaTeX path and ran > texhash. Thanks, this is useful for me. I didn't know they were separate. >> Which version do you have installed? > > I'm running version 5.1. > >> Does the terminal output or View Messages toolbar give any useful >> output that you could share? > > The output was helpful, but didn't make much sense until I read more > about how SageTeX works. > > Sage processes files in two steps. You write your document, then you run > LaTeX (pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, or regular latex) on it. This > creates a second file, with the Sage processing instructions in it. This > has a *.sagetex.sage file extension. > > At this point, you have to run Sage on this secondary file, which > generates your equations, plots and other elements so that they can be > incorporated into your original LaTeX file. At that point, you run LaTeX > on the original file a second time to produce the typeset document. > > The problem I was having is that I was only running LaTeX on my new > documents. The converters I set up didn't follow the appropriate pathway > of LaTeX -> Sage -> LaTeX. Once I added in the Sage processing step, > everything started to work. Thanks for the explanation. It would be nice if the module took care of all of this. >> Do you have a minimum working example that you could send or link to? > > Absolutely, attached is a simple example that I'm working up into a > template. > > I'm just getting started with Sage, but now that it's working, I'm quite > impressed with what I've seen. For the past 10 years or so, I've been > using aging copies of Maple for symbolic computation, and this looks > like it will allow me to modernize. (I don't actually have to do much > symbolic math, so it hasn't been that big of a deal.) > > Being able to work from within LyX, in a manner very similar to the way > I work with R code via Knitr/Sweave, is going to be very nice. Knowing > that it's all open is even better. I'm also a big fan of R + Knitr (+ LyX) and I agree with you. I think having things integrated is closer to how our minds work and allows for a more natural workflow. > PS, when I get time, I'm going to try and update the instructions on the > Wiki to make a couple of things clearer. I'll also probably write a blog > post about it, just so I've got a record of how I got things working. If > you'd like, I'll send you a link when it's finished. Yes, I'm definitely interested. This would be great. Thanks a lot Rob! Scott
