Murray Sargent: Math in Office

In the (almost) old days, when you paste a bitmap into a rich-text editor, the editor would give it to OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to figure out what to do with it. But these days, OLE isn’t always available, so it’s more general to...

One of our testers inserted a Microsoft logo image into RichEdit and saw an inky black rectangle. Ignoring any connotation that this might be a bad omen (!), I proceeded to study image formats in Wikipedia and in MSDN. (Not that I hadn't already scoured...

This post describes a couple of performance improvements introduced in RichEdit 8: 1) a more efficient display tree, and 2) a faster rich-text formatting mechanism. Performance is always of interest, partly to make the user experience more enjoyable ...

Windows 8 introduced substantially better touch facilities than those available in Windows 7. One cool thing is the new touch on-screen keyboard, which is enabled if you have a touch screen. To see it, swipe in from the right side, touch the cog icon...

Notation is a favorite topic of mine being at least partly inspired by Bertrand Russell, who once wrote , “A good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times make it seem almost like a live teacher…and a perfect notation would...

In this day and age with touch pinch and expand zooming of screens, zoom is everywhere! So you might wonder how to zoom the contents of a RichEdit control. There are two ways: 1) maintaining the display width and rewrapping the text as necessary to fill...

This post describes a little trick that lets you insert a table into RichEdit and into Word just using the keyboard. Admittedly in Word, you can use the handy table tool on the Insert tab with a mouse or with a keyboard. But in WordPad and the Windows...

An important part of a computer’s user interface is to provide for user interaction alternatives to the usual sight-oriented methods. Such capability requires programmatic access to what’s on the screen so that screen reader programs can express...

RichEdit has provided support for client spell checking ( TOM object model and temporary character formatting—see tomApplyTmp ) and autocorrect (see EM_SETAUTOCORRECTPROC ) for many years. But it has been the RichEdit client’s responsibility...

Office 2013 has undergone a substantial shift to a relatively new display facility, Direct2D , and a new text facility, DirectWrite . These are the display facilities that are used on Windows Phone 8, the new Windows RT slates, and optionally on Windows...

On the surface, Unicode appears to be a just large collection of characters. But before Unicode text is displayed, substantial “shaping” can occur. This shaping is the process of mapping the Unicode characters to glyphs and placing them correctly...

Up until RichEdit 8.0, RichEdit’s native image support was limited to metafiles, enhanced metafiles, and simple images like bitmaps (bmp’s). If OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) had supported other types, such as jpg’s, png’s...

An earlier post describes the RichEdit nested table facility and how the EM_INSERTTABLE and EM_GETTABLEPARMS messages could be used to insert and examine tables. Now those messages are documented in MSDN along with a new message, EM_SETTABLEPARMS that...

There’s been a lot of buzz about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and it is really exciting. One particularly exciting thing missing in the buzz is that Windows 8 contains a new RichEdit! Since the new version is now publically documented on MSDN...

RichEdit’s name derives from its ability to represent rich text. Such text is comprised of text runs with different sets of character and paragraph formatting properties along with embedded objects, such as images. Some discussion of paragraph formatting...

I started this blog in 2006 and now it’s 2012. How time flies! At this point it seems worthwhile to post links to previous posts grouped according to subject. The present post provides links relevant to the main theme of the blog, math editing and...

The previous post introduces Hermann Klinke’s math input notation, which he developed to speed up entry of equations for real-time note taking in OneNote. The post is followed by a very interesting set of comments comparing high-speed, and yet easy...

Hermann Klinke has designed and instrumented an input notation on top of the Microsoft Office math facility that you may want to try. It significantly reduces the number of keystrokes needed to input mathematical text. His motivation is to have a way...

Accents are quite common in mathematical text. For example, in physics one uses one- to four-dot accents to designate the first through fourth time derivatives, respectively. Primes are often used on integration variables. Transforms can be designated...

This blog post describes a cool insert-symbol facility built into Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. The facility is handy for locating mathematical symbols as well as other characters. And with the developments in Unicode...

Most mathematical documents and books use fonts with serifs , such as Times Roman. However mathematical expressions can also be displayed with sans-serif letters, such as the font this post uses. In fact, sans-serif letters are used sufficiently often...

As you can see in this document , Presentation MathML is part of HTML5. This is very exciting, since HTML5 is becoming the primary new web standard format. You might think that this would automatically make it easy to render MathML in a browser. In fact...

Nali commented on the post Office 2007 Math Editing/Display that it would be nice to have keyboard hot keys to switch between Professional and Linear format (build up/down), and between Display and Inline mode of equations. This is a great idea especially...

People have been asking about a couple of acronyms fairly often these days, so here’s a blog post on them. They are described on the web already if you type the right queries, but a little more motivation might be useful. The acronyms are NINCH...

Roughly eight years ago, some colleagues and I had the good fortune to spend an extraordinary afternoon with Donald Knuth, the primary author of TeX, at his home on the Stanford University campus. Among many things, Donald showed us how he uses TeX to...