Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

John Dell — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:08:11 GMT

Thank you very much. This is exactly what I was after. As a general comment on mathematics in Office 2007, it certainly looks better than the previous EqnEdit but I do miss the key board shortcuts!

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

cfp — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:58:03 GMT

Yeah that was useful. Still I think in your next patch you should add support for breaking between pairs of bracketed expressions, e.g. between (a+b) and (c+d) in (a+b)(c+d).

In an ideal world manual alignment would never be necessary, the automatic one would be sufficiently sensible for almost all occasions. Still some automatic alignment is better than none *cough*LaTeX*cough*...

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

suma valluru — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:12:12 GMT

Hi, the way you have explained about the breaking equations is very excellent...please go on and explain more and more in your next blog...

Cheers,

Suma valluru

---------------------------

www.esumz.com

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

cfp — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:18:11 GMT

Another line splitting bug:

if you have an expression containing brackets with multiple bar delimited arguments, e.g.:

[A+B+...+M | N,O,...,Z]

that is longer than one line, then the equation will just be clipped by the margins, rather than breaking on to a new line.

Furthermore, manual breaks inserted in the expression are ignored.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

cfp — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:41:25 GMT

And one more bug:

When using the "shift-enter" trick you mentioned above on equations in a table cell, if the block of equations would go across a page boundary, Word gets confused and prints the first equation on both pages.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

ls — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:28:00 GMT

My Word 2007 cannot display any equation in two or more lines even if "Professional" and "Change to Display" are selected. The content outside one line is clipped. I wonder if you know how to fix this.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

office 2007 needs work — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:58:13 GMT

Why can't I just break lines by pressing enter in an equation where I want? Why make it unnecessarily complicated?

More on Math Context Menus

Murray Sargent: Math in Office — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:46:06 GMT

An earlier post describes math context menus (right click somewhere in a math zone) for changing the

The Math Paragraph

Murray Sargent: Math in Office — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:08:30 GMT

The earlier post Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines describes equation line breaking and alignment.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

Alfred Pramble — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:21:13 GMT

It does not seem possible to prevent line-breaks after an "=" sign. If you have "a=b+c" and it lands near the end of the line, you will get blah blah a=

b+c

which looks awful. I have not found a way to say, do not break this equation.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

MurrayS — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:58:47 GMT

In principle, you should be able to put the equation into a box (enclose it in \box(...), where the ... is the equation and use a context menu to specify no break. But unfortunately the context menu is missing.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

Alfred Pramble — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:49:34 GMT

\box(...) does not work. It does no harm, but the equation is still broken after the "=". Continuing in this vein, I thought word might hesitate to break a subscripted object. I tried

(ABC=B+D)_\zwsp

but it still breaks after the "=".

In normal text, we already have non-breaking spaces and dashes. but I guess a nonbreaking "=" has never seemed necessary.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

Jochen Schmidt — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:53:04 GMT

What is a \zwsp ? If you type it into an equation, it disappears, but produces no error. If you type zwsp into the help system, nothing is found.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

MurrayS — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:53:00 GMT

\zwsp is a zero width space, Unicode U+200B. It doesn’t display anything, but it is a character and can be used to suppress an empty argument dotted box. There's more discussion in my post on

The Invisibles (http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/archive/2008/08/26/the-invisibles.aspx)

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

MurrayS — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:02:24 GMT

\box() should have a context menu that lets you specify no break, but it's not there :-( So I don't know how to prevent a break in Word 2007.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

Kjell — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:16:09 GMT

Hi!

I too am confused why I can not insert a line-break manually in an equation. This was no problem in the previous versions of word! Instead, I now end up with multiple "equation boxes".

For everyone who seriously need control on their equations (no breaks, controlled breaks, formatting etc.) you really need to look to LaTeX. It takes quite a bit of up-front effort if you have never used it, but it typesets math equations beautifully. Google is your friend, I recommend MikTeX as your search term (small caps works just fine.)

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

MurrayS — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:58:56 GMT

Actually it's easy to insert a line break manually into an equation. Just right click on a binary or relational operator and a context menu appears with the option to insert a manual break. You can customize the break to be before/after/duplicated.

Note that typing Enter terminates both the equation and the parent text paragraph (see my post on the math paragraph). Typing Shift+Enter inside a display math zone terminates the equation and displays the place holder for another equation. The set of equations so entered can be aligned with respect to one another.

The reason for doing it this way is to provide very powerful inter/intra equation alignment, together with the overall measurement that stretches enclosing brackets to the full height of the broken expressions they contain. This feature is not available in [La]TeX: large brackets across broken equations have to be entered as a given size, e.g., \bigg(, which may not match to what's inside the brackets.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

salmonrose — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:11:50 GMT

Shift + Enter doesn't work for me. It still creates a new paragraph. How do I fit this?

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

Shane Hutchinson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:23:15 GMT

Could you show the text that is required to create an alignment within an equation.

For example, under the "Bracket" menu, the first one under "Common Brackets" at the bottom.

I am trying to do a similar thing, but having no luck with the right alignment and the "tabs" that are used there.

re: Breaking Equations into Multiple Lines

MurrayS — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:19:32 GMT

You can enter the first example under "Common Brackets" using the linear format by typing into a math zone the following

f(x)={\eqarray(-x, &x<0@x, &x≥0)\close

See Sec. 3.19 Equation Arrays of the linear format paper (http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v2.pdf).

Basically the & is used alternately to space and to align as in TeX. The first & on a line is an align operator, since there's an implied space operator at the start of the line. Sec. 3.19 gives a more complicated example.

Re Shift+Enter, that does start a new equation in a math paragraph provided you type the Shift+Enter within a math zone. Outside a math zone, Shift+Enter inserts a line break, but doesn't end the paragraph.