I have been using Maple in college math teaching and for research since last century, and am the Maple booster at my university, looking after what our IT people do each summer as they upgrade our site license Maple. I am a super propagandist for using Maple.

However, so many things that were easy to do in previous decades long interface, I can no longer due because of the unnatural way certain things are grouped in the Ribbon tabs but also because so many keyboard shortcuts are not very well documented (a problem in the past as well). For example, in Karishma Puwani's "Introducing Maple 2025 for Education and Research" video (April 2025) she has a few seconds long example of command completion and argument completion that she did not articulate enough for me to follow what keyboard actions she used. I have not been able to find by Googling how she did the argument completion! She did not respond to my email request for clarification.

In plots in Drawing mode it was easy before to insert Nonexecutable Math, now one has to subsequently invoke Insert and Edit etc to just do this, but at least I was able to figure out how to do it, unlike the argument completion action. 

Finally I figured out that the F5 toggle (3 modes) still works in paragraph mode but... where does one click if F5 is not an option. This was trivial from the toolbar with the 3 modes for Math, NonExec Math, Text next to each other. I cannot find where this disappeared to. 

And the before Insert Paragraph Before/After Cursor feature is missing. Does paragraph correspond to a Document Block to insert now? In a 2d math input region before we could Insert Text from the Insert menu and it would convert to a text region. How can we do this now? Is it possible? If I click on Insert Text it puts the text far below the insertion point I want my text input region to be. Using an inserted math mode input and converting it to Text (not 1d math) allows me to put text where I want it better (perhaps because of my ignorance, but I have been doing this for decades).

I could go on but I reinstalled Maple 2024 so I could annotate some graphs to export to JPG for my hobby book, to JPG since Export to PDF directly still does not seem to work for me after all these years that I complained about it before. [Annotations get lost or mispositioned.]

Also the Executable Group left margin marker seems to be gone. Can we toggle that back on somehow so we can clearly see these? Text and math input seem to be linked in some ways that are not visible to me.

Help?

@Carl Love As I said above, things change and there is an increasing tendency to hide menus and scroll bars and links etc from view. In this case I had not seen the up arrow upload icon before. But I am willing to learn! :-)

@Carl Love I haven't done this in a while, so things change. I never saw any way to attach a file to this post, and absentmindedly submitted it with no attachment. What did I miss?

Well, I also forgot to check the box to receive replies to this comment! Great. Now that I am editing it, I don't see the check box.

bob

Wow, these responses have been really useful. I will be studying the various solutions. Thanks to each of you for your prompt responses.

Thanks! I tried putting right quotes around various parts of the expression, but obviously failed since I was blindly editing without any clear idea of what would work. This delayed evaluation problem should be addressed by Maplesoft in some Help page because it is not clear to nonexperts when it is necessary and how it works. Creating animations seems like an activity that elementary users should be able to do without being derailed with no online resource to consult.

This morning I had 20 minutes before leaving for a class that I wanted to show a derivation of the equation of a tangent plane at a generic point in order to derive a property of the tangent plane as  a function of position, and the dreaded overbar came into my formula from the palette dot product, so finally after years of not trying to find a work around I called tech support since I was out of time and was informed that by using either Student[LinearAlgebra] or VectorCalculus, this would not occur since it assumes variables are real! I had only loaded LinearAlgebra, and I had always thought Student just had the extra tutorials and a few less commands like the elementary row operation commands compared to the full package, but NO. Finally I learned the simple answer. I should have known Robert would have the answer. Thanks, Robert.

I am sitting here by myself after 6pm during a transit strike in Rome, already abandoned by my colleagues in this applied math research institute, and the Maple newsletter entry captured my immediate attention. Robert, you are inspiring. Please keep these gems coming. Meanwhile I will eat more pasta tonight...(but gastritis is reducing my allowed wine intake!  :-( )

I better get moving or I will miss my window of opportunity when the strike takes a rest during evening rush hour...I still don't understand how these strikes work. Pardon my comment devoid of mathematics, but we are also living our lives while doing mathematics...

I cannot resist adding another comment. If you had animated this graph but going inside the original parabola instead of outside, you would have seen the normals forming a caustic curve: the evolute of the parabola. I have a way too long worksheet on various properties of the evolutes of the ellipse, and one of the last things I did was make animations of these curves which are a fixed distance along the normal lines, which develop singularities along the evolute. Very cute and so reachable from elementary calculus with a tool like Maple. 
[www3.villanova.edu/maple/misc/frenetellipse.htm]
This is sort of like optics but in physical optics you have to recalculate the new normal at each successive curve to get the wavefronts, not continue along the original normals. But still it gives a flavor of what happens in optics.

As a physicist in a math department, I think being able to write an equation for the tangent line at an arbitrary point on a curve, and then place a condition on it to solve some interesting problem, is a perfect example of what calculus is all about, and of course Maple is the perfect tool to do this. Your example here is really inspiring.

But I am only one person in a big department very aware that my colleagues and even our textbook whose author built a 24 million dollar house from his profits will not support me in being different from the norm, so I have wimped out.