As a geotechnical engineer, much of what I calculate relates to depth or settlement.  Which, by tradition, is signed as positive in the vertically down direction.  Hence, I want to be able to produce graphs with positive y-values (e.g. depth, settlement, etc.) plotted in the downward direction (effectively, all I want to do is simply reverse the direction of the y-axis).  One workaround is to simply multiply all y values by -1 before plotting.  But this isn't ideal (as the values show as negative).  I've had a look through the documentation and haven't found a clean way of doing this.  Is anyone able to confirm whether its possible?  Or am I wasting my time looking?  Thanks in anticipation, Ian

I'm looking at Maple as a possible alternative to Mathcad (which I've been using for years, but is now very jaded compared to other options like Maple and Mathematica).  I'm a civil engineer and for what I do, one of the better features of Mathcad is the way it handles units.  For example, if I specify an angle in degrees (say phi=30 degrees) and then ask for sin(phi), I get 0.5.  At face value, I though Maple would do the same kind of thing.  However, this doesn't appear to be the case (see attached worksheet).  The only workaround that I can see is to specify the angle in degrees (but without assigning ) and then multiply the specified value by pi/180 (to convert to radians) before passing it to the sin function.  Which is all a bit messy and not at all an attractive solution.

Am I misunderstanding the way units work in Maple and is there a clean way of specifying angles in degrees (which is what engineers work with) and using these values directy in trig functions?

Thanks in anticipation,

Ian