Design Science News

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!

New MathType 6.6 brings math support to over 350 applications and websites

We just released MathType 6.6 for Windows, which features handwritten math entered using mouse, tablet or touchscreen (for Windows 7 users) as well as compatibility with over 350 applications and websites in areas such as education, elearning, calculation, word processing, presentation, email, blogs and wikis. Among the newly supported applications and websites are Google Docs, Gmail, Blackboard and many others.

We have been working hard on our Equations Everywhere and Anywhere!™ initiative. Our plan is to make MathType work with virtually all applications and websites used by students, teachers, professors, elearning authors, scientists, and engineers. Go visit our "Works With ..." web application to see if your favorite applications are already in our database. If you don't find your favorite application or website, or want to give us feedback in general, let us know by emailing  interop@dessci.com or on Twitter @MathType. We value your feedback!

Working with Windows 7? We'd like you to beta test MathType!

Design Science is currently looking for beta testers who are working with the pre-release installation of Microsoft Windows 7.

If you're interested, please send an email to beta@dessci.com.

Thanks,
The Beta Team
Design Science, Inc.

Design Science is currently looking for beta testers who are working with the pre-release installation of Microsoft Windows 7.

If you're interested, please send an email to beta@dessci.com.

Thanks,
The Beta Team
Design Science, Inc.

Creating and using accessible mathematical content: AHEAD conference, July 20-25, 2009

The Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD) hosts an annual conference for professionals in the fields of higher education and disability. This year's conference will be in Louisville KY, where Steve Noble from The University of Louisville will present a session titled Creating and Using Accessible Mathematical Content. Many educators are now required to produce accessible materials for their own students. One of the products Steve will demonstrate is our newest product, MathDaisy. He will show how easy it is to use MathDaisy with Microsoft's "Save As DAISY" Word add-in to create accessible math materials from Microsoft Word.

To see other conferences where Design Science products and technology will be demonstrated, refer to the Events page on our website.

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.

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.

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.

Apple Picks MathType as the Equation Editor for iWork '09

 It is an exciting time here at Design Science. At last week's Macworld Expo keynote, Apple's Phil Schiller announced that the new version of iWork '09 supports MathType. Since then, the buzz has been tremendous. While his demonstration showed MathType with Pages, in fact MathType works with all three iWork '09 apps, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. Many Mac users use math in their work -- students, teachers, professors, engineers. Until now, they have been forced to use Microsoft Office. Now that iWork supports MathType, we expect many will make the move. To read more about the announcement, see our official press release: Macworld Expo: Apple Picks MathType for its new iWork '09 Suite.

If you already use MathType, you may want to visit our new page in the MathType Interoperability Registry: MathType works with iWork. It gives the details on using MathType with iWork '09. If you don't yet own MathType, visit our MathType for Mac home page for details on all you can do in MathType.

Microsoft is bringing VBA back in the next Mac Office!

As many of you know, Mac Office 2008 lacks VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) support. This means that some of MathType's functionality within Word will not be available in the forthcoming (August) release of MathType for Mac 6.0. Microsoft has announced that they are going to bring back VBA in the next major release of Mac Office. Unfortunately, it appears that it won't happen before 2010. Better late than never! We explain the situation more fully on the MathType and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh page.

MathType Tip: Drawing attention to your equations with comments and annotations

Suppose you're writing a PowerPoint presentation to introduce function rules to your 6th grade math class. You'd like to be able to annotate an example equation with labels, but don't know how to do that.

There are so many reasons to annotate equations, and so many ways to do it that it's impossible to cover them all in a single page, but this new MathType Tip will show you how to add comments to your MathType equations in the most common scenarios.