We are having the same difficulty: the site times out. I also posted a ticket via the Brownstone support site, but only relatively recently. No reply as yet. (See also the post "Brownstone unavailable: alternatives?" on this site.)

Very, very, painful for staff who have learnt to depend on latex authoring to have to revert to constructing question banks manually. Maybe the Maple T.A. support folk can have more influence in getting this service back?

For my money this third party dependence has always been one of the really weak points in the Maple T.A. product. Latex authoring is a basic *requirement* for maths-heavy authoring (in practice), and should be supported internally. Our local distributor did suggest that this was on the cards; it would be nice to see this confirmed.

Cheers,
Paul

In the meantime the brownstone site is down for more than 10 days! I got a response from brownstone that they have a hardware problem but this was 5 days ago. I have no idea why they need so much time to plug in some new parts.

I agree with other comments that MapleTA is nearly useless without the latex2edu functionality. The dependence of a third party server is a very bad solution. Maplesoft should react and provide a fallback server for this funcionality. I have no understanding for the fact that we don't get any support by Maplesoft in this case.

Michael Kaplan
Technische Universität München

We have been in contact with Brownstone, but haven't received a confirmed date of when the converter will be functional again.

Maplesoft is committed to providing our users with the tools they require to be productive. Providing the LaTeX conversion service for Maple T.A. at our site is in the plans, but was not scheduled to be done until this summer. With the report of problems on the Brownstone site, we are investigating this issue and hope to have something available for you to use by the end of this week.

In the meantime, if anyone has a LaTeX file that they absolutely require before the end of this week, please feel free to send it to me directly (louisek@maplesoft.com). The turn around time will not be as quick as the web-based converter, but it will be faster than someone converting the files by hand.

Sincerely,
Louise Krmpotic
Product Manager, Maplesoft

11.30pm Friday night, Australian time, and all is (still) not well. Nearly two weeks of blackout now, and as per Michael's message, we now have a handful of assignments that are rapidly approaching deployment date. Staff here have (only) had experience in setting assignments via latex (it really is the only option for a maths-intensive assignment), and I foresee an small avalanche of bad press coming down my pipe from this incident. Already I've heard comments along the lines of "thank goodness we didn't set the tests using this software", which is really disappointing but none too surprising: why should we expect end users to divorce the Maplesoft and Brownstone components of the system? For what it's worth I've again submitted a bug to Brownstone (and received a "still not working for me either" response!).

So it's a veritable pain... particularly for someone stuck in the middle as an implementer of Maple T.A. Any news re a replacement conversion facility would be *very* welcome: the offer to convert things via email is very welcome --thank you!-- but the just-in-time nature of assignments that are produced by multiple time-strapped lecturers makes conversion via email, and across time-zones, a bit impractical. Still nice to point to, however! ("If you folk were just a bit more organised we could have sent it via email....")

Cheers,
Paul

Louise,

thanks very much for the rapid intervention here: it's very much appreciated! I just uploaded half a dozen question banks from last year to check out the conversion and things are "very familiar". That is, it's working as per Brownstone's version, which is great. And with any luck that old-time choking on Maple-graded questions will soon be a thing of the past!

Best wishes,
Paul