MaplePrimes - answers and comments on Question, 2DMath in Mapleprimes

My attempt

Alec Mihailovs — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:07:24 Z

I've just clicked the button in the editor and pasted the expression. In Firefox. Then clicked the centering button to center it.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

ahh, thanks

acer — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:30:20 Z

Thanks Alec! That's better for Primes, but worse for me, as the inability-to-post problem looks to be at my end.

A related question: is there anyone for whom the 2DMath displayed in Alec's response looks good? For me, it doesn't even look as good as the 2DMath in the Online Help using the exact same browser and session. It's small, and more jagged than even lack of antialising usually gives.

acer

My attempts:

epostma — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 18:06:52 Z

Here's what I get if I copy and paste the 2D output from Maple:

This is an image! Note I have extended typesetting turned off in Maple, so that's presumably why BesselJ shows up as BesselJ instead of as J_0. I'm not sure exactly how copy and paste works in general, but I think the "providing" program (Maple, in this case) can offer a number of different formats for the copied content, and apparently the editing widget selects the image format. It's quite a wide image though; about double the width of the expression itself. So less suitable for in running text () because of the abundant amount of whitespace.

And here is what I get if I type or paste into the popup window:

It doesn't hang for me, but it didn't show anything useful in the little preview thingy until I also typed something into the box (a space, which I subsequently removed again). (That's probably because I pasted using the middle mouse button; when I retried using Ctrl-V it did update immediately.)

Note that the first image doesn't seem to have any useful "alt" text; the second one does. I concur with Alec and Acer that the second image looks horrible; the first is quite a bit better.

By the way, this is on Firefox 3.5.9 in Ubuntu 9.10.

Erik Postma
Maplesoft.

Holy degradation!

JacquesC — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 05:47:30 Z

Ok, so the typesetting on the old mapleprimes was always fairly poor (and somehow seemed to degrade over time).

Now, not only is it much much worse (those images have some of the worst typesetting I have seen in a very long time), the usability has essentially completely disappeared! Typesetting on the web has, in the past year, taken a huge leap forward with both jsMath and MathJax. Why on earth did MaplePrimes take a huge leap backwards???

Have you guys ever heard of 'use cases'? If you had figured out what the standard work-flow was for visitors to MaplePrimes, you would have figured out that Maple Documents/worksheets are not the 'solution' to anything in this particular case.

Ah well, it seems that the signs are clear: I should disappear from here again, and go hang around 'modern' sites again, places that understand the usage patterns of their community and what technologies 'work'. I'll come back when MaplePrimes has caught up with current web usability patterns and technology usage.

Doesn't look good

Alec Mihailovs — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 08:40:15 Z

Doesn't look good for me. What is especially bad is displaying sin, cos, log etc. in italics, and a wrong spacing - I posted about that in another thread,

There is a good and simple solution - using jsMath - but that was not done in the previous version of this site and probably, is not going to be used in this one.

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Alec Mihailovs, PhD
Maplesoft Member

image

pagan — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 19:33:09 Z

Where's the image from Erik's first attempt? I don't see it.

It would be great if we could insert 2DMath that looked great, had equivalent 1D notation alt tags, and could be obtained by pasting from maple directly without using the button. The third of those aspects is least important, but having the first two aspects, combined, is desirable.