Important menus in the Maple window

This subsection contains information on inserting text in your Maple session and saving and printing your output. You should find this information useful in writing up the lab reports. Using Maple for your writeup is probably the most convenient way to do it.

The main Maple window has five main menus labelled File, Edit, View, Options, and Help. We will only need to use the items on the first two menus, but feel free to investigate the others. Here is a brief summary of the most important commands from the File, Edit, and Help menus.

• File menu
  • New
    Selecting this item will erase all your work and initialize the Maple worksheet. Don't choose this item unless you are sure you want to do this.
  • Open ...
    This item pops up a file selection dialog box, allowing your to load a previously saved Maple worksheet.
  • Save
    Saves the present version of your worksheet. If you haven't named it yet, it prompts you for a name.
  • Save as ...
    Prompts you for a name to save the worksheet under. This lets you change the name of your worksheet.
  • Print ...
    This item prompts you for a file name and saves your worksheet as a PostScript file for printing. To actually print the file, see the section below on printing.
  • Exit
    This item quits Maple. You are asked if you want to save changes before exiting.
• Edit menu
  • Cut
    Deletes a selected block of text. (Text is selected by dragging with the left mouse button.)
  • Copy
    Copies a selected block of text to a clipboard for pasting elsewhere
  • Paste
    Pastes the contents of the clipboard into the worksheet at the current cursor position. Most useful for pasting plots into your worksheet. For copying and pasting text, the standard X mechanism (see section below) is probably easier.
  • Delete Cursor Region
    Deletes the current region in the worksheet. Maple worksheets consist of Input, Output, Text, and Separator regions.
  • Insert Prompt
    Starts a new Input region.
  • Insert Text
    Starts a new Text region, for typing in comments or explanations. Typing in a Text region is not processed as Maple commands.
  • Insert Separator Line
    Inserts a horizontal separator line. Useful for separating regions.
• Help menu
  This menu provides access to the extensive Maple on-line help system. The Help Browser item is especially useful; by using it you can learn a lot about Maple.
  • Help Browser
    Brings up the Maple Help Browser. Using the Help Browser is described in the next section.
  • Keyword Search
    Brings up a dialog which allows you to search for a particular character string in the Maple Help pages and go directly to any of the help pages found by the search.
  • On Context
    Changes the mouse pointer to a ``pointing hand'' shape. Clicking on any region in the Maple window will bring up help specific to that region. For example, clicking on the Options menu will bring up a help describing that menu.
  • On Keys
    Brings up a window listing the special key bindings defined in the main Maple window. For example, according to this window, hitting Ctrl-U will erase the current cursor region. For power users only.
  • On Version
    Brings up a window with Sir Isaac, providing version and platform information. If you aren't using the Motif window manager, there may not be a way to get rid of this window.