Using Giac.jl with Pluto reactive notebook

LaTeX Rendering in Pluto

GiacExpr and GiacMatrix automatically render as LaTeX in Pluto notebooks! No extra conversion needed:

using Giac

f = giac_eval("2/(1-x)")  # Automatically displays as LaTeX fraction
df = invoke_cmd(:diff, f, giac_eval("x"))  # Derivative also renders as LaTeX

M = GiacMatrix([1 2; 3 4])  # Matrices render as LaTeX too

This works because Giac.jl implements Base.show(io, ::MIME"text/latex", expr) which calls Giac's native latex command.

Rendering preserves the expression you computed

GIAC evaluates the arguments of every command, and not every result is a fixed point of evaluation. The integer factorization ifactor(360) is the product 2^3*3^2*5, which evaluates straight back to 360. Giac.jl therefore quotes GiacExpr arguments passed to the rendering commands (latex and mathml), so they typeset the expression as it stands instead of a re-evaluated copy:

using Giac
using Giac.Commands: ifactor, latex

f = ifactor(360)   # 2^3*3^2*5
latex(f)           # "5\cdot 2^{3}\cdot 3^{2}"  (not "360")

The same holds for notebook display, so an ifactor result shows the factorization rather than the original number in any frontend that consumes the text/latex MIME type — Pluto, Jupyter, or KaimonSlate:

ifactor(360)       # renders as 5·2³·3²

Every other command keeps GIAC's normal evaluation semantics — only latex and mathml hold their argument, because they are the ones whose job is to show an expression rather than compute with it.

A demo notebook is available at examples/02_latex.jl:

using Pluto
Pluto.run(notebook="examples/02_latex.jl")

See screenshots: