Dear Mary,
My first reaction when I read your message was "define the word good" :)
Given that your colleague wants to use Powerpoints, I suggest he goes either
with Equation Editor or MathType.
Equation Editor is just the free version of MathType. Of course, Equation
Editor has fewer with fewer functionalities than MathType.
As both John Wallace and Richard Williams have told you, Equation Editor
comes free with MS Office, but it is not installed by default you have to
use the MS Office disk (or if it was installed via the LAN I imagine there
is an equivalent way).
I would start using Equation Editor, because if you decide to upgrade to
MathType, MathType automatically recognizes whatever you have done with
Equation Editor, so no work is wasted.
I personally use MathType, Marcello Pagano already talked about it.
MathType does not have the problem Nick Cox is talking about (i.e. it let
you uses the fonts you want, so you can create both text and equations with
the same fonts and it looks great)
MathType (and I think Equation Editor too, but I am not sure) integrates
very well with Powerpoints. For instance, you can create a Powerpoint slide
with an equation in it and then you can animate the pieces of the equation
having variables moving around on the screen and saying "this represents
income" (or whatever you want) and then go back to the original place in the
equation -- very cool to teach undergrads and MBAs
The downside is that it is a bit slow to write up complicated formulae.
I also used Scientific WorkPlace mentioned by Dimitriy V. Masterov but I did
not use the latest version, I used version 3.5
Scientific WorkPlace is much faster to type than MathType, but it is not
WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and formatting can be a pain. In the
version I used if you had a long equation in a parenthesis, it would not go
to the next line, it would just print out of the page and the manual says (I
am not kidding) "if you know LaTex you know how to fix it". I never bothered
with it anymore.
But than again, all economists (except me) use it, so it can't be that bad
and maybe it's better in the new release.
Best,
Renzo
* From
� "Mary (Merlin) Marshall" <[email protected]>
To
� [email protected]
Subject
� st: OT: your favorite math equations editor
Date
� Wed, 17 Mar 2004 13:41:33 -0500
Greetings Statalist,
I have a collegue who teaches dynamic and thermodynamic meteorology at Ohio
State University. His operating system is Micro$oft Win2000 (maybe Win98).
He has been thinking about using Powerpoint to teach his classes, but his
lectures involve deriving lots of equations and he does not have a good
equation editor. This equation editor would also be used to generate
equations in research articles for publication in meteorology journals.
So, I have a question for all of you using the Windows operating system who
must write a lot of equations in your publications, lectures, etc. What
editor would you recommend/what is your favorite editor? If you have
experience with more than one equation editor, what were the pluses and
minuses of each?
Thanks,
Merlin Marshall
[email protected]
*
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