Murray Sargent: Math in Office

Recurring questions are what RichEdit's are available, where they are installed and what features they have. A relatively new question is which RichEdit's support the new Office math editing and display. So this post attempts to answer these questions...

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...

Long equations often do not fit on a single line and ways are needed to break them up for display on multiple lines. Word 2007 offers two approaches: automatic and manual line breaking. A related feature is alignment of multiple equations, such as aligning...

This is an introductory post to help users who want to create stunning technical documents in Word 2007. If you’ve typed Alt+= in Word 2007, you’ve seen a math-zone object inserted that says “Type equation here”. Actually you can type any mathematical...

Imagine typing alt+= in PowerPoint, OneNote, Excel, and, of course, Word and Outlook to enter a math zone and then type a^2+b^2=c^2<space> to see the Pythagorean theorem beautifully typeset on your screen! Or some way more complicated equation,...

Alex Ioffe emailed me Hi Murray, I realize you probably get this often by why can't someone (pleeease!) publish some official documentation of Word2007 Equation editor features? I have seen all of the MSN videos regarding it features and they...

This post is a summary of material I've given in recent talks on math in Office such as this one . In the talks, I describe and demonstrate how Unicode's rich mathematical character set combined with OpenType font technology, TeX 's mathematical typography...

Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics, Version 3 (Unicode Technical Note #28) is now posted . The differences between Version 1 and 2 of that paper are largely cosmetic, but there were enough changes in Version 2 to merit a new number. Version...

One subject that seems to come up every other month or so is how RichEdit tables work. So I might as well post the answer. Hopefully RichEdit tables will eventually be described in the Windows SDK. They are not directly related to Math in Office, but...

As noted in the previous post Keyboard Entry of Subscripts and Superscripts , the preferred way to enter subscripts and superscripts is by using the keyboard, rather than the math ribbon. For example, type alt+= to insert a math zone followed by a^2+b...

Two very interesting developments are happening that will improve Word 2007’s MathML support. The first is key for helping in getting Word 2007 math text into the scientific and technical publisher workflows and the second may help in this regard too...

Digging through old doc files, I ran across the following summary of RichEdit up through Version 3.0. It’s more detailed than my post on RichEdit Versions , so it might be of interest to history buffs, anyhow. And it does describe the riched20.dll that...

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...

If you use Word 2007 to create a document containing mathematical equations and expressions and save it as a web page, it looks just as good in Internet Explorer as it does in Word 2007! The equations look as though they had been typeset by TeX or in...

In my blog description, I promised to write occasionally about the early Windows days. So here's a post on how David Weise and I got Windows 2.0 into protected mode and blew away the old DOS 640 KB RAM barrier. If this hadn't happened, we'd probably be...

Math fonts differ from other fonts not only in their extensive coverage of math operators, symbols, and math alphanumerics, but also in the large number of glyph variants they have to support two sizes of sub/superscripts and many sizes of stretchable...

When writing the Math in Office 2010 post back in July, I could just imagine the disappointment various people would have when they discovered no mention of equation numbering. After getting math into PowerPoint, equation numbering had been the most often...

One of the key technologies behind the high quality display of mathematical text in Word 2007 and RichEdit 6.0 is a special component called LineServices along with its sibling Page/TableServices. In addition to handling math display, various versions...

A number of readers have inquired how to Find/Replace mathematical expressions in Word 2007. This post shows how it could be done nicely, although unfortunately this functionality didn’t make it into Word 2007. A previous post shows how to find...

Before comparing these two math XMLs, I'm excited to point you at Jennifer Michelstein's nifty post on Equations in Word 2007 . It comes complete with instructive videos demonstrating how to enter mathematical expressions using the Equation Ribbon as...

MathType users may want to convert their equations to Word 2007's native equation format. This can be done by exporting the equations in MathML and then pasting them into Word 2007. There are some problems and useful tricks that Dadi Gudmundsson ( www...

Science and Nature, two premier science publications, are having difficulties with Word 2007’s elegant new mathematics facility. Part of the reason is due to misunderstanding about Word’s MathML support, which hopefully this post will help to rectify...

The Office math ribbon has a few examples of matrices, but you might like to be able to enter a lot more kinds of matrices and enter them substantially faster. For this you can use the linear format (see Sec. 3.9). For example, a 2x2 matrix is entered...

I have been having a great discussion with Christian Lerch about computer-oriented mathematical notations. He has a program that lets you input MathML using a pure ASCII syntax. It is similar to ASCIIMathML . A lightly commented EBNF grammar of his MathEL...

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...