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Subject:Documents with lots of mathematical equations From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Mon, 5 Oct 1998 09:04:19 -0600
Tyrin Avery has to produce <<...a 300+ document containing muliple
complicated financial formulas onevery page.>>
There are plenty of choices, depending on your budget and your
technical inclinations. I know people who swear by TeX, a well-known
mathematical typesetting language, and you should be able to find
tons of resources on this via a Web search. I believe that there's
also shareware galore to help you create and print TeX files. It's
not the best bet, though, as the learning curve is moderately steep.
I'd tend to stay clear of Word for such a task because I simply don't
trust it for long documents. I surveyed techwr-l and copyediting-l
some time back, with the following results: Some people never have
any problems, and some never get the software to work stably at all
with long documents. I'd confidently recommend Word (since that's
what you're currently using), but the people who don't have problems
were rarely able to explain how to solve the long-document problems
to those who were experiencing them, other than for a few obvious
problems. You mentioned that you have Framemaker, but don't use it,
and that suggests the most obvious answer: use it. Frame is pretty
much bulletproof with long, technical documents.
Purchasing specialized software is another solution if you really
can't convince yourself to do the work in Frame. For ca. $500 U.S.
(as a really crude and therefore misleading average), you can
purchase software such as MathCad or Maple that will do all kinds of
neat things with equations, but that's probably overkill. (I also
have vague memories of "Mathwriter", which was a wordpro designed
specifically for mathematicians; someone with a better memory
should be able to provide details.) The simplest solution I can come
up with is to purchase either "Expressionist" or "Mathtype", both
relatively inexpensive (ca. $200 or less) software that serve
only one purpose: to create equations. You pick the basic form of
the equations from a list of WYSIWYG templates, then type the
specific details into the template; you can even embed templates
within templates. To finish off, you save the finished equations in
any of several graphics formats, import them into your wordpro, and
you're home free. I've worked with both; MathType struck me as
superior, but that was several years ago. I don't have the ordering
info. handy, but it should be easy to find this software on the Web.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"Microsoft Word: It grows on you... but with a little fungicide,
you'll be feeling much better real soon now!"--GH
