Dear all,A quick question. I'm currently writing up a medium sized document (30 pages, 100 formulae or so)which I would usually do with Latex. However, this time I'm obliged to use Word, and do the formulaewith the equation editor. Words fail me in trying to describe just how awful (in my opinion of course)this thing is to use. And whilst I'm not a Donald Knuth standard font/typesetting snob some of the results that come out are just plain ugly. Anyhow, I'm basically fishing for advice. Are there any simple Word add-ins to do nicer formulae that I can implement simply? In particular the problems I'm finding are (a) equation numbering - can this be automated/done rationally?(b) doing structures of the Latex form \mathrm{abs}(x)=\left\{ \begin{array}{cc} -x & \mathrm{for}\,x<0\\ x & \mathrm{for}\,x>0\end{array} \right.Can this be done?(c) also the whole thing seems very buggy - doing a large, but not unreasonable, number of cut and pastes ofparts of formulae seems to cause it to crash/get very confused.Any advice out there?many thanks,Tom

Hi, try the followingTeXaideRegards,MaTT

TW >> (c) also the whole thing seems very buggy - doing a large, but not unreasonable, number of cut and pastes ofparts of formulae seems to cause it to crash/get very confused TW, be careful and keep plenty of copies; I have had some very upsetting moments with Word where some innocent action has crashed the program and turned the document into a Word killer. The end result is that you can only restore even parts of the document with ridiculous amounts of messing around.

I totally agree with the comment on keeping plenty of copies. Once all the equations (about 20 long ones) in my doc turned into big red "X" (anyone had similar experience?), which taught me a very sad lesson

<i>which I would usually do with Latex. However, this time I'm obliged to use Word</i>I can never get enough of MS-bashing. Goddamn distilled mediocrity!! Unstable fluff, thats what its products are! Now we know why Greenspan is perplexed at the elusive/vanishing productivity gain What Unux giveth MS taketh away.....

Onuk >> TW, be careful and keep plenty of copiesYou bet. My worst case was trying to adjust one page of a long (~100 pages) technical document, containing a table, to landscape so that you could see all the columns. This minor change should involve just adding two page breaks with an orientation change. Actually it involved the whole document and it's auto backup going psycho, taking out Word just on being opened, and my having to type the whole exceedingly interesting load of tripe in again.

I've found Word with equation editor to be very temperamental. It is a bug related to copy and paste - I think somehow the clipboard gets stacked up and then crashes after a time. Now I ensure I manually type all equations, this is time consuming but not as time consuming as retyping the document which has happened to me a few times! Alternatively copy and paste a load, save and then quit word (it will give a message about losing equations from the clipboard) and then go back in and continue. Not an elegant solution, but it hasn't crashed since I started doing this.I have tried to write to microsoft about this problem but for bug fixes they need repeatability of the error which is not easy to arrange!

>However, this time I'm obliged to use Word.Come on who can force you to use Word. If it is a publisher then fire the publisher and get a new one. If you still have to write in word I am happy I am not obligated to read it Sorry, I have not much good to say about the word equation editor. Word is okay for love letters, then I normally include one or two equations, but that's it! I started to write my book in word many years ago, I had to give it up, and I am happy for it. It looked incredible Ugly! In LaTeX only my photo came out Ugly (I think very few females have bough my book for this reason). Next edition I will flip the photo around in photoshop to show my inner beauty

"Word is okay for love letters, then I normally include one or two equations, but that's it!" Love letters are best written by hand, and no equations should be included.

may be you are right, I was wondering why she never wrote back to me The problem is I cannot even understand my own handwriting, seems like I have a problem when it comes to love letters then. Next time I try only sending her my photo, a picture can tell more than thousand words.

I wrote a several hundred page thesis with hundreds of tables, equations and figures in latex. LaTeX isn't great for secretaries making 1 page documents, but for formula laden texts with huge numbers of cross references, it is a breeze. I recently started work at a place where everything must be ms-word so I use ms-word and number everything by hand. How I miss LaTeX for the formulas! If you want to go the route where you use all the word features, there are some useful tips on Microsoft's pageAs for stability, definitely, save often. I find it useful to append numbers to my versions, e.g. foo_01.doc. There are some options, but nothing's perfect:- do as the equation editor is always nagging you: upgrade to MathType (but see below)- use something like tex2word (requires mathtype, see below. Works on about 9 in 10 equations, by my trials)One thing to watch out for is that nag-ware update, MathType. The equation editor that ships with word seems deliberately buggy, so as to entice you to "upgrade" to a functioning product. You can download the program for free, but it stops working after X number of days. Here's the biggie: Making it your default equation editor means that end-users CAN NOT view the equations you embed, unless they also have MathType. I now use only the vanilla editor for this reason. After all, if I can dictate what viewer the end user must use, I'd tell them to get a PDF viewer so that I could send them files created by pdflatex.

Little while back I heard a story that Microsoft had bought out therights to all the TEX dialects from Knuth, for a few million. Basicallyhe needed the money to finish the next few volumes of his Programmingseries. Maybe this means that TEX genius is somewhere in the wordeditor some time soon...

QuoteOriginally posted by: jamesbattleLittle while back I heard a story that Microsoft had bought out therights to all the TEX dialects from Knuth, for a few million. Basicallyhe needed the money to finish the next few volumes of his Programmingseries. Maybe this means that TEX genius is somewhere in the wordeditor some time soon...I think it's a load of bull. Knuth is Emeritus Professor of the Art od Computer Programming at Stanford. He is actuallygiving money to people who find bugs in his programs and typos in his books. He definitely doesnt need M$ money.And what use it would be for M$ anyway? They wouldn't know how to write a proper GUI for it. I think Apple actually could do a decent job of presenting TeX to the uninitiated in the form ofpretty icons, like they did with Jaguar (OS X), completely hiding BSD Unix underneath from graphicdesign girls

I think the Microsoft buys out Knuth rumor can be attributed to a press release in 1998. Check the press release date; April 1, 1998...

For the past several years I've been using MathType (current ver. 5) in MS Word to construct formulae in my documents. For me, it works well, is simple to use, and provides use w/i HTML. MathType 5 is a mathematical equation editor for Windows and is available from Design Science (www.dessci.com).