Design Science News

Positions available: Senior Software Engineers

Design Science is growing!

We're looking for several Senior Software Engineers with 5+ years of development experience to join our MathType product development team. This position entails working on cross-platform, retail, technical publishing software that interoperates with other applications (such as Microsoft Office) and many websites. Candidates for this position will be expected to have expert level knowledge of C++ and object oriented design and development experience. Any of the following would also be a plus: COM, extensive Windows development experience, Apple Macintosh development experience, previous work on retail software. If you are interested in learning more about these positions visit the Careers page of our website , or send your resume to jobs@dessci.com.

Design Science (DSI) was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Long Beach, California, with an engineering team in St. Paul, Minnesota. We are the worldwide leader in developing software for scientific and technical communication. Our MathType, MathFlow, MathPlayer, MathDaisy and WebEQ software products are used by scientists, engineers, educators and publishing professionals, for authoring and publishing mathematical notation in print and online documents, and for building web pages with interactive math content.

NCTM: See how MathType 6.5 can revolutionize the way you work with math

We will be showing off MathType 6.5 during the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Annual Meeting & Exposition at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC. Exhibits are Thursday through Saturday, April 23-25. MathType has worked with Microsoft Office for years, but here are just a few of the products and websites you can use MathType with:

• Apple iWork '09
• Maple
• Math Help Forum
• Wikipedia
• Wimba

Stop by booth 1600 and see if your favorite applications or websites are among the 100s that MathType now works with. For information on this and other conferences where we will be exhibiting, see our events schedule.

MathDaisy 1.0 is now shipping

After lots of hard work, MathDaisy 1.0 has been released.  MathDaisy enhances Microsoft's Save As DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word to convert Word documents containing math notation to DAISY Digital Talking Books, ready to be read by students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with vision and learning disabilities, including blindness, low vision, and dyslexia.

If you are a teacher or professor who has students with vision and learning related disabilities, MathDaisy provides a way for you to produce the accessible materials your students need.  If you are a student, check out the MathPlayer-enabled DAISY book readers listed on our DAISY for Students web page.

For more information on MathDaisy, see the MathDaisy press release or the MathDaisy product page.

Position available: Accessibility Product Manager

The Accessibility Product Manager will be responsible for overseeing the marketing strategy and product line vision for our line of accessibility products and technologies. Design Science plays a leading role in bringing mathematical accessibility to the world. We have won NSF grants to support our research in this area. We have several products with accessibility features: MathPlayer, MathType, and our latest, MathDaisy. Our MathFlow product line provides support to publishers to enable their math to be accessible. With the rise of accessibility and etextbooks in education and industry, this is a great opportunity to be part of something that is big and getting bigger. For more information, please visit our Careers page.

Quark announces MathType integration in XML Author 3.0

Recently, Quark announced Quark XML Author 3.0 for Microsoft Word, now featuring integration with MathType. This allows authors to create technical XML documents without having to worry about the underlying structure, with the assurance that their equations will survive the transition from Word to XML. For more information see Quark's XML Author 3.0 press release.

Eat more chocolate, do better math!

As reported by the UK Telegraph, according to a research study presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference, eating chocolate may improve our ability to do mathematics! Actually, it appears they are really talking about arithmetic but I'm going to give it a try anyway.

New Tech Note: missing or substituted characters in equations

The issue of fonts is one of the more complicated aspects of dealing with math typography because standard system fonts only include the most basic mathematical symbols. Without fonts that include the characters you would like to use in your documents, an application or printer cannot draw the character properly, resulting in missing or substituted characters.

To address this issue, Design Science freely makes available its MathType fonts, a set of fonts covering hundreds of mathematical characters that are often ignored by system fonts. If you have MathType or MathFlow installed, you probably already have these fonts installed.

While the MathType fonts include a large number of commonly used mathematical symbols, if you are authoring equations using less common characters, you may need to install and use outside fonts with Design Science software. Whether you are using a custom font or a public font, Design Science products can use the font of your choice. In most cases, if the font is installed to your system fonts folder, the font will automatically be available for use, but in rare cases some configuration is necessary. If you notice that MathType is not recognizing the font you need, please see the MathType SDK section "Extending MathType's Font and Character Information." If MathFlow is not using the font of your choice, see TechNote 8: Missing Characters.

Are you sharing Word + MathType documents with a colleague who may not have a mathematical font installed? See TechNote 50: Sharing Documents Containing MathType Equations.

Are you printing MathType equations on a printer that uses its own local fonts instead of system fonts? See TechNote 77. Equations Are Printed with Characters Omitted, Clipped, or Substituted.

If you still have questions about fonts in Design Science products, our Support Engineers are always happy to help.