Not all objects can be saved to .m and retrieved sucessfully in a restarted or new session. This is the case not only for "escaped" locals, but also for some objects implemented as function calls of a module member.

> restart:

> t := ScientificConstants:-Constant('c'):

> type(t, specfunc(anything,ScientificConstants:-Constant));
                                     true
 
> ScientificConstants:-GetValue(t...

I was just reminded of an aspect of Maple GUI Components, new to Maple 13, that has sometimes come in very useful to me. It is the ability to refresh a component programatically.

I should explain. The old (and current default) behaviour is for the GUI not to refresh any other components until the current component is finished (ie. returns control).

The relevant situation in which this matters is when a given component has action code whose

I just noticed that in Maple 12 (and 13) the Layout palette's subscripted atomic identifier entry had its hover-over tooltip changed. By hover-over I mean the text based tooltip that appears after a slight delay when the mouse point is allowed to hover over the entry.

In Maple 11 it showed as subliteral which, while perhaps to entirely clear to everyone, was at least accurate. It meant: the unique subscripted name.

For example, x-subscript-y, as a subliteral...

On some Linux distributions, the default font (Lucida Bright at size 12) for text mode in Maple's Standard GUI doesn't look as good as it might at the default magnification.

Here's a screenshot of Maple 12 and some text in a worksheet (on my very old Fedora Core 2).

Notice how some letters look odd. The "i" and "s" are mismatched, as are the "u" and "c", etc. The screenshot may not do full justice to its ugliness. That is with Maple's option for font antialiasing enabled (though it wasn't improved by disabling the antialiasing -- those letters' sizes were still mismatched).

This is with Lucida Bright, which as I gather is the "recommended" font for a Java application that is intended as cross-platform. That is used at size 12 as Maple's default style for text mode (on Linux).

So I installed the "Microsoft TrueType core fonts", by following the instructions here.

My old Linux FC2 X server can handle TrueType fonts, as I believe  most  modern  Linux distributions can.

Now I get the following look, first with and then without font antialiasing enabled. It is much improved.

I don't know how the default appearance on other, more modern Linux distributions looks. Perhaps the Lucida Bright 12pt font appears more pleasing on new distributions using the stock fonts. Feedback is welcome.

I was considering what sorts of "normally coded" things might get broken by the loading of a Maple Library package and the ensuing rebinding of names.

And so I tried this,

> with(RealDomain): # rebinds sin

> convert( cos(x), sin );
                                     sin(2 x)
                                 1/2 --------
                                      sin(x)

I was actually surprised to see that work OK. I was expecting `convert`...