I remember now why the "grind" solution does not work for me.
I am evaluating so-called symbolic expressions anywhere in Euler. The code calls Maxima to return a string. The actual output is much later at the time, when I print the result of the Euler command. One of the possible results is a symbolic expression (which is a specially marked string). At that time I output the result in 2D.
This logic makes it impossible to first evaluate and output in 2D, then call "grind" to get a string version of the result.
I think the correct solution would be a function print2D, which handles the two cases mentioned in the previous posting.
Thanks for your assstance, R.G.