Hello All:

I hope I don't get flamed here, but I have run into a lot of difficulty trying to do something that I consider a basic required feature of any analysis and visualization tool. I'm talking about labelling plots (titles, captions, axes, legends, etc.) with both text and greek symbols (at least!). Anyways, I have become very frustrated at this, and now I am trying to make a case for why this should be clarified and simplified for those of us who have Maple (I have both Maple 10 and Maple 11 for what it's worth) in the hopes that the powers that be make this a priority.

From what I have found, to plot a title like, "Sine(\sigma)" is a total snafu (where I use \sigma as a way to represent the actually Greek symbol for sigma). In my mind, every workaround I have come across amounts to a kludge, nothing more. There is not one solution I have seen posted on in the documentation that addresses this with any sort of elegance.

As such, I am making this a formal call to MapleSoft to improve their graphics paradigm. Is anyone else frustrated with this? Or have I missed the clean solution to this one?

Cheers,

t.

Post Scriptum

By way of example, I comment on two other software packages below. Why Maple cannot do something that seems to me to be a basic feature is beyond me.

Case 1 - IDL:

The simplest way I have found to do this in IDL is via a textoidl package (freely available) whereby all that is required is a working LaTeX engine in your PATH. Effectively, it calls out to LaTeX, typesets the string appropriately, and passes back to the graphics engine. I assume that if you are using Maple, you may have had to write something in LaTeX, so this is almost a given.

What the package does is allow you to assign a LaTeX string to a variable, and thus you have your title, e.g.,

titlename = textoidl(Sine$(\sigma)$);

plot(some sine finction, title=titlename);

and you're done. That's it. Axes, or any other lable are the exact same. Moreover, whatever your default font style is (Roman, Hershey Vector fonts, Sans, etc.) is typeset as you expect it. This allows you to spend time on your analysis, and not plot lables for publications.

physweb.mnstate.edu/mcraig/textoidl/

Case 2 - DISLIN:

Yup. DISLIN. These are, if you can believe it, FORTRAN calls to a graphics package, and yet, within Fortran I create can lable plots with symbols, super-/sub-scripts, you name it. If Fortran can do it, so should Maple, I would think. Admittedly, the plots tend to be somewhat more simplified than what I would be doing Maple. Nonetheless, for examples of DISLIN, see:

www.mps.mpg.de/dislin/overview.html