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.