One of the key areas targeted for improvement in this release of Maple is the graphical display.

Plotting performance has been improved on all platforms through the internal use of hardware floating point arrays (hfarrays) .

On the Power-PC Macintosh, Windows 95, and Windows NT platforms, significant performance improvements are also available in the OpenGL plot driver.

Since the speed of most systems is now adequate for drawing plots using PATCH style as a default, maple now uses PATCH as a default instead of the less aesthetically pleasing HIDDEN style.

Labeling of plot axes is improved in Release 5.

Plot labels no longer collide.

Labels are more aesthetically pleasing.

Several improvements have been made to the Postscript plot driver.

New options include: axiswidth, axisheight, leftmargin, bottommargin, preview.

General formatting improvements have been made.

It is now possible to use suffixes (pt,cm,in) to denote length units in dimensions; the default is Postscript points (1/72 in).

The value of the Maple variable noborder determines whether or not a border is drawn on Postscript output.

Correct character codes are now used for all characters.

New packages, some of them quite substantial, related to graphics or graphing capabilities have been added in this release.

The new package, geom3d, includes new graphics functionality.

The algcurves package, new in this release, has a new command to draw singularity knots of algebraic curves in C^2 that have a singularity at (0,0).

Some packages which existed already in Release 4 have been improved in the way they handle graphics.

"DEtools"

DEtools[DEplot_polygon] - Generate the plot of the Newton polygon of a linear differential operator at a point.

PDEtools[PDEplot] - Various improvements; in particular, some nonlinear plots can now be done.

The calling sequence has changed.

There are now fewer restrictions on the form of the PDE passed to PDEplot.

The basecolor option has been deleted.

New options include: scene, x<idx>, u, animate, ic_assumptions

"plots"

plots[animatecurve] - Create an animation of the drawing of a 2D plot

plots[polyhedraplot] - Increase the number of polyhedra supported from 5 to 123

"plottools"

plottools[arrow] - Generate plot objects for arrows

plottools[rotate] - Specify axis of rotation

plottools[scale] - Specify centre of scaling

plottools[homothety] - Scale PLOT and PLOT3D structures with the same ratio

plottools[project] - Project PLOT and PLOT3D data structures

plottools[reflect] - Reflect PLOT and PLOT3D data structures

plottools[vrml] - Plot three-dimensional surfaces in VRML (1.0)

"statplot"

statplot - Now 3D: xscale, xyexchange, xshift

statplot - Added 3D histograms and scatterplot

statplot - Added format={excised,sunflower,agglomerated}

statplot - syntax changed

Some new graphical features are available only on the Power-PC Macintosh, Windows 95, and Windows NT platforms.

OpenGL Plot Driver

Available only on the Power-PC Macintosh, Windows 95, and Windows NT platforms.

Fast and high quality 3D graphics.

``Smart'' Plots

Allows the user to drag equations into a plot region to create a plot.

Perform operations on a plot using context-sensitive menus.