Yes, the GUI does everything as expected; the particular command line interface that's causing problems for me is the MapleTA "plotmaple()" call, which only allows functionality roughly equivalent to Maple's text-mode interface (which has the same issue, since both appear to use the mplotgif and mplotjpeg backends).  This is in addition to the fact that MapleTA in particular (and I suspect various other web-related tasks for which people may want to use Maple) is limited to web-standard image formats, GIF and JPEG, the plot devices for which cannot (according to the Maple documentation) honor non-Roman character sets.

I have to say I really liked the Sage idea; I'll have to keep that trick in mind in the future.  I don't think I will be able to use it in this particular case, but the output posted above seems to be very well rendered (and more accurate than Maple's bitmap devices which seem to displace the axes by a few pixels).  ps2gif had occurred to me as well, and may work for others with similar problems, but it will probably not work with MapleTA.

Phil

 (edit:  I posted this in the wrong place; it was intended as a reply to "Standard vs. command line" amongst Alec's and acer's posts)

Another piece of information:  You don't need to export the *entire* worksheet to HTML to get a good gif; right-clicking on an image in a worksheet and exporting as GIF works, too.

Unfortunately, this still seems to be useless on the command line or in MapleTA.

PR

Looking through the documentation again, it does look to me like I'm doing things correctly.  My library can be used within Maple itself, and can be accessed from the web server as a file, but MapleTA persists with the "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The Maple library, (valid URL of a .lib file), cannot be located." error.

If the documentation did not assert that this is an intended use of MapleTA's algorithm designer I would just give up, but of course it does.  Is this feature supported or not?  Is there any way to at least narrow down the possible causes for the given error message?

Phil

Upon revisiting the designer interface (which I had previously abandoned in favor of command-line text editors for the sake of speed and usability), I was reminded that there was an "official" method for including libraries. I thought I might take the naive approach and see if I can't kludge something together; however, even the maple-recommended method doesn't seem to do much.

When I create even a maple-graded question and use the designer (as prescribed in the official documentation here: http://www.maplesoft.com/tacontent/view.aspx?SID=5389 ) to add a library from the course website for processing a plot (resulting in a libname='...' argument to plotmaple), I invariably receive the following error:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The Maple library, https://#domain#/mapleta/web/#course#/Public_Html/maple.lib, cannot be located.

The original URL is in fact valid, and my browser can download the file directly without a problem. What gives? Am I doing something wrong? Is our site configured wrong? Or does the feature simply not work as advertised in the documentation?

Phil