@acer Thank you for your detailed reply to my question.  I've been swamped recently so haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it looks very promising and I look forward to giving it a go.  I'll let you know how I get on!

@tomleslie 

Your number 1 is okay for me because I will actually display the figures using the plot embedded component, which I can set the width and height of explicitly.

For your number 2, I'm afraid I'm beginning to think I might have to accept this conclusion.  It's annoying because the functionality is built into the GUI so it seems like replicating it with a command should be straight forward, but I can't find evidence that this has been designed into Maple up to now.  I might make a feature request if we can't find an existing solution.

Thanks for your time spent helping me with this.

Thanks for the quick replies so far.  I've tried using the view option as suggested by Tom, but this also crops what's shown meaning I lose part of the plot, while I to keep the original plot elements but scale them to better fit the plot area.  It might be helpful for me to show the example I have in mind. The workseet zoom.mw creates an arrow and two spacecurves, and the plots[display] command creates a view of these with a lot of wasteful blank space.  I want to reduce the blank space without cropping out the informative parts of the plot.