Hello,

I started using Maple TA to create some online exercises for students at a universtity of applied sciences in Germany. I proceeded in writing the exercises with the help of LaTeX. Here I would like to share some experiences in a kind of overview. For me there are 4 major fields of disaffection:

1. In general, the Maple TA rendering of math content is very poor. Look at the layout produced by LaTeX and you know what I mean.

2. The conversion of LaTeX files provided by Maple TA (http://www.maplesoft.com/products/mapleta/latex2ta/) is defective. The most hindering is the fact, that plain spaces are very often stripped by the converter. The support's advice to use "\," to insert spaces manually doesn't really help because afterwards the lost spaces very often are at different locations, the old spaces are doubled. There are a lot more examples I can tell you if there is any interest (see also point 4). I also tried to use the converter in the mode "version 6 or later". In this mode the converter wasn't even able to produce a qu-File (although it stated that the conversion was successful). Is it possible that I am the first who tried it?

3. The online help is no help. Many of the examples found there do not work (examples 2 and 3 in Maple-graded in LaTeX, all examples in Graph Sketching Questions, example 2 in Matching Questions, ...). Maple TA: Don't you check your examples before? By the way: I found the same examples mentioned above unchanged in the help system of Maple TA version 7.

4. The support is hopeless. In most cases the support tells me that there is a flaw in Maple TA or there is no answer at all.

Hey, I am using version 5 of your software and I believe (see above) that version 7 can't help me. Is there any quality management at Maple TA or are you just adding features to sell the next version?

Is there hope for me or should I look for another software?

Thanks to everyone who was patient enough to stand my complaints

Mich.