Everyone knows what a French curve is. Heck, some of us even have a set kicking around. But I have run into a brick wall in trying to find out how a french curve is actually made, or defined. Over several sessions, I can find nothing on the net that even hints at the answer.

French curves have been in use for ages, and they must have an origin. Either they are generated using some kind of function, or they were perhaps...

What do I have to change in the settings to get numerical results from simple expressions using symbols? In other words, when I enter something like 2 x pi or e, I want the numerical answer, or rather something that reads 6.28... As it is, it just returns 2 x pi again.

While posting an initial question is not problematic, when editing or adding a comment thereafter, one is presented with a box in which to compose that is partially concealed by content at the right of the screen, e.g., Active forum topics and Recent comments. One can continue to type behind the veil and have it display fine in the preview, but this seems anomalous. I have noted it on two different computers. Do others have this problem? Is there a way to work around this besides truncating ones sentences with early returns?

As per instructions at the bottom of page 217 of the user manual, I wish to alter the y-axis range of a 2D plot. The instructions say to right click the plot region. Select axes and then range, however, doing so allows one to select axes, but the menu item range is nowhere to be found in the menu as described by the manual. The menu only offers the choices of normal, boxed, framed, none, properties, labels, toggle gridlines, and set gridline properties.

My old Mathcad 7 had a snap to function that allowed one to trace a given plot. Using the point probe on Maple does not seem to have an equivalent feature. If one wants to know a particular x y location, one must hover the point probe over the desired spot, but this is not ideal as it it very sensitive to movement. Is there a snap to feature for tracing plots? If so, how is is activated?