The third example on the Plot Tickmarks and Gridlines help page - ?plot,tickmarks(tickmarks) - shows how to put labels at specific locations on a plot axis. But I couldn't find anything in the help pages about altering their font. However by changing the labels to names (enclose in left quotes, instead of double quotes) their font could be set using the axesfont option.

Perhaps something could be added to the example mentioned above. In the longer run though, all the help pages for plots need to be re-written: at present they resemble an untidy scrapbook.

J. Tarr

Jacques posted a link to an interesting article in the New Yorker about feature creep. Perhaps we should ask whether Maple is suffering from this malady, but before doing so we really need to answer the question "what is Maple for?" So here's a place to say what you think Maple's main purpose is/should be. Here's my shot: Maple's prime purpose is to help teach math. J.Tarr

I find that reading lots of help pages causes eye strain. A way of reducing this that works for me is to change the background color of the help pages from white to yellow. This can be done by setting HelpBGColor=255,255,224 in the ini file. On Windows XP the ini file will be found at C:\Documents and Settings\Joe User\maple9.ini or maple10.ini. For Maple 11, the file can be found at C:\Documents and Settings\Joe User\Local Settings\Application Data\Maple\11\maple.ini

At what age do you think students should start learning and using Maple? What are your reasons?

Having looked recently at a suite of engineering software in use, I wondered whether engineers would need maths for much longer. Of course they’ll always need sufficient for business purposes, but my guess is maths will become unnecessary for engineering in much the same way as it’s unnecessary for weather forecasting. There would probably be a residual role for maths in engineering research, but not in the mainstream, and that would have huge implications for schools and universities. How do those engaged in teaching maths to budding engineers see the future?