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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

No this isn’t about some kind of science fiction, this is about five Unicode characters that are useful for mathematics, but are generally invisible or should be. The characters are the zero-width space (U+200B), function apply (U+2061), invisible...

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...

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 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...

This post discusses the Word 2007 math RTF control words. A good way to understand these control words is to note that they are actually OMML tag names written with RTF syntax. Hence you can refer to the very thorough OMML documentation for more detailed...

A couple of comments have raised the question of people outside Microsoft using the various versions of RichEdit. Specifically, Teis Johansen asks, "Just to be sure. Can I redistribute RichEdit 6.0 with my application?" and Kyle Alons asks, "So what's...

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...

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...

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...

This post is a companion to Automatic RichEdit Hyperlinks . As stated in that post, RichEdit has two kinds of hyperlinks, automatic hyperlinks (autoURLs) and friendly name hyperlinks. A friendly name hyperlink has a name, which is displayed, and a hidden...

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...

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...

Office for Mac 2011 has many cool additions. The best of them all (well you know my bias!) is that Mac Word 2011 has the elegant Office math editing and display facility! Although I do not own a Mac, my next-door neighbor Dylan Tom does and we gave the...

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...

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...

The Send-a-Smile and Send-a-Frown feedback from Office beta users is very useful for finding out where we’ve done right and wrong things with the new Office. From time to time I’ll post thoughts on some of the feedback that pertains to the...