For the last few days I have been getting as many a 4 email notifications for a single update to a thread in which I am participating.

Maple 14 - returning after not using Maple since M13...

1. Still can't figure out how to scale images and text. I tried putting an image in a table cell with some text next to it. The only way I can see is to put any images in a space by themselves and not relate them to text. What I see on the screen has little relevance to the printed product, and the only way I have found to scale images correctly is by trial and error. See #6 below for time penalty for changing a table cell size.

2. I don't get to choose the header/footer font size?

3. The footer date format is 12/1/10, which is very nearly the worst it could be, and doesn't respect my Windows settings: 2010.12.01.

4. There is no option to use the file save date rather than the current date.

5. Dragging a corner of an image changes the scaling. IMO, that's what the tabs on the sides and top/bottom are for. Dragging corners should preserve scaling.

6. Changing a cell size in a table means waiting 10 s to get full access to Maple menus and the document (dual 3.4 GHz CPU, 3 GB RAM).

7. I clicked on the Space Shuttle Sim to get an idea of what Maple can do, and then waited 10-15s while Maple played with the palettes and swapped to a new document.

I guess that Maple is about more than this, but I am [relatively] new to it, so I begin where I can...these are usability issues. I understand that Maple has been selling the doc interface for a few releases, but not made much progress.

I guess that I can kiss (no, I'm not upset, just a style of speech) off the document mode and just use the power of Maple to calculate what I need and copy the results in to a word processing program...

[a few hours later] I should say that I found some more comments on the slow interface, and took the hints to close the palettes, which sped things up quite a bit...the penalty is, of course, that I must open them to use them, and that sort of defeats the purpose. Still, if I regard them as drop menus...

There is still the issue of scaling images, and I guess from a quick glance at the included examples that Maple has not figured out how to handle images. I tried to lock the image size, but have not found a way to do so. The quick tutorial on the Maple web site was a great help in getting up to speed quickly.

I am returning to Maple after a bit of a dry spell (I'll post about that in another posting) and see that each posting summary seems to be more about avatars and big thumbs than about content. I don't actually care about thumbs up or down; it's content that I want to know about. If 10 people think the post is not helpful, and I think that it is helpful, that's what counts. And it seems to me that the posts might be ordered by thumbs, and I'd like to see date order. Maybe I...

I have been advised to remove the older version before installing the new version, but I seem to recall that installing the new version while the older one is installed will upgrade configuration files to the new version. I'd also like the capability to be able to run earlier versions of Maple while I am checking out the latest version...is it safe to install multiple versions on the same Windows system?

Thanks,

Rich

Good morning!

I am currently involved (though hopefully near the end) in a lengthy discusion regarding how to use the mapleprimes editor. I should say up front that I am grateful for any forum that provides me a place to ask questions and to help others. I've been around for a few years, but only lately have I decided to put substantial effort into learning Maple. And it is a substantial effort, despite the Maple ads about how easy Maple is to use.