Design Science News

MathType 6.7 now available for Windows!

It is an exciting time around the offices of Design Science. There has been a lot of momentum and continued growth in our open-source, joint project MathJax to display math properly in all browsers and our development team has just put the finishing touches on the latest version of MathType for Windows!

MathType 6.7 for windows has a bunch of new features:

• Microsoft Office 2010 Support. Don't worry, it also supports Office 2007, 2003, and 2002 (XP) so it is backward compatible.
• New or improved support for:
  • Moodle
  • MoboMath
  • Evernote
  • ...and more. Check out our "Works with" application and see if your favorite applications or websites are in the list of over 350 that work with MathType.
• Equations in email. We've expanded our support for equations in the following applications:
  • Gmail
  • Hotmail
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Outlook
  • Outlook Express
  • Windows Live Mail
  • Windows Mail
• Compatibility with Windows 7, Vista, and XP operating systems
• Generate braille math output: We collaborated with the team over at ViewPlus to generate documents that contain math into braille documents using ViewPlus's Tiger Software Suite

Download the MathType 30-day free trial and let us know what you think!

MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken

I have some good news and some bad news. First, the good news is that the new HTML5 standards initiative includes support for MathML and has been embraced by all browser vendors. This should reduce the barriers to producing web content with accessible, searchable, and interoperable mathematics.

Now the bad news. Unfortunately, MathML support in the next version of Internet Explorer 9 appears to be broken, based on our testing of Microsoft's latest Platform Preview. Read the whole story in MathML in HTML5: Internet Explorer 9 is Broken. It only requires a small fix but Microsoft likely will not give it much priority unless the STEM, Education, and Accessibility communities make it clear how important MathML support is for them. Our hope is that you will help us spread the word about this problem and make Microsoft understand the need to make MathML work once again. If you agree, let them know by any and all means at your disposal.

MathML 3 moves closer to being a standard

There's lot of good news around MathML these days and this piece of news is a bit of a scoop:  MathML 3 will become a Proposed Recommendation on August 10. Proposed Recommendation is the penultimate step on the road to being a full blown recommendation. Among other things, making it to proposed recommendation means that there are at least two different implementations of every feature in MathML 3. The only thing left is for members of the W3C to vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the recommendation. The voting ends September 10, and a final decision by the W3C director will be made around the end of September.

As I discussed in a previous post (MathML becoming a W3C Standard), MathML 3 cleans up a number of unclear areas and adds line breaking and elementary math. On our accessibility blog, I will post a video showing some neat examples of accessible elementary math — take a look over there in a few days or subscribe to that blog so you'll know when it is posted.

I'm really pleased to say that the next version of MathPlayer has the most complete coverage for MathML 3:  it passed a whopping 97% of the 1670 tests in the W3C MathML test suite. Many implementers are hard at work adding in MathML 3 support.  I don't know when their products will be out, but we hope to have MathPlayer 3 out in late fall.

MathType works with equations in Moodle assessments, forums, and more

If you are involved in education or distance learning, you are probably familiar with Moodle. For those of you who are not, Moodle is one of the largest open-source Learning Management Systems (LMS), and is used by over 50,000 universities, schools, and private organizations. Learning Management Systems are designed to help manage online instruction with lessons, quizzes, discussion forums and other instructional and administrative tools.

MathType works with Moodle modules including assignment, chat, feedback, forum, and others. With MathType and Moodle, you can:

• Copy equations from your exiting worksheets and paste them into Moodle assignments.
• Create a mathematical glossary in Moodle, teaching students to use proper mathematical terminology.
• Students and colleagues can copy equations out of Moodle to use in their own work.

We've recently updated our instructions for using MathType with Moodle and we would like to get your feedback. What could we add to or change about MathType that would make your job easier?

In addition to working great with Moodle, MathType also works with over 350 other applications and websites. Look through the list to see if your favorites are there. If they're not, let us know!

MathPlayer 2.2 Released

MathPlayer is by far and away the most used MathML renderer around -- in the 27 months since MathPlayer 2.1 was released, 615 million expressions on 29 million pages have been rendered by MathPlayer! I'm happy to say that we've only had a few bug reports since 2.1 was released, some of which were fixed with intervening bug fix releases. We've fixed many of the remaining ones with this release of MathPlayer 2.2. We've also taken some big steps in 2.2 to improve our font support. When the STIX fonts are finally released in a month or two, MathPlayer 2.2 will be able to make use of them.  Even without them, our improved font support makes expressions look much better, as you can see in the screen shots below:

      
  MathPlayer 2.1 vs. MathPlayer 2.2

One thing that hasn't changed with MathPlayer 2.2 is its price -- it's still free. You can update your version of MathPlayer by visiting our MathPlayer downloads page.