Reply To: Any MathMagic Users?

If you open a Mathtype eps file in Illustrator you'll see lots of very odd things. I find that if you have an equation along the lines of

(x + y) = (a + b)

then the eps file will contain a number of different overlapping text objects, each containing part of the information, so (if you ungroup and separate them) you'll get separate text objects containing

x y

a b

( )

( )

+ =

+

The spacing between the characters within each text object is set by tracking.

This is really weird, and a great nuisance if you need to edit the eps file in Illustrator rather than in Mathtype. And you might want to do this if you need to change the fonts – another real problem with Mathtype is its lack of support for full Unicode sets. By default MathType uses Symbol for Greek characters, and fakes an italic for them by skewing. It tells you that you can get a wider variety of glyphs using 'Insert Symbol' to add characters in whatever font you choose, but when you actually try this you get a tiny subset of characters from your font. Generally these days, if there are Greek letters in the text then I'm using actual Greek characters in whatever font I'm using, and it's nice if the glyphs in the displayed equations match this.

I've just been testing MathType 6.7 for the Mac, which has just been released, and am disappointed to find that it has the same problems. On the plus side, it now allows saving as PDF, and when this file is opened in Illustrator each character is its own text object, which is better than the very odd tracking from EPS. However, from the PDF, Greek characters come through as outlines rather than glyphs.

I've tried the demos of both MathTools (was InMath) and MathMagic, but the big reason for continuing with MathType is that it's the only one which can automatically extract equations from Word documents. Actually, I emailed movemen a few months ago asking about features and pricing (as instructed on their website). I never received any response, so I wonder whether MathTools is still in production. But it looks like they've got some problems on their hands.