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Comment by chronial | Hacker News Reader

Did you have a look at word's math support in recent years?

I find using the equation editor in Word to be physically debilitating. Pretty much any software involving tiny graphics and fine mouse work triggers severe eyestrain headaches and neck fatigue.

There's a document here, describing keyboard entry:

http://www.chem.mtu.edu/~tbco/cm416/EquationEditor_main.pdf

It's basically a markup language of sorts, and I'd use it if I were presently writing a lot of text with equations.

For better or worse, working in industry, my reports are free of equations! I've formed the hypothesis, that when managers and non-technical people see an equation, they assume the report is "incomplete," i.e., the equation needs to be turned into an actual result.

I've been to academic talks where, instead of typeset equations, the author just copies the source code from their MatLab file to a PowerPoint slide.

In university I used Word 2007 to type math lectures in real-time. I never had to resort to the mouse at all for equations. You seem to be thinking of the stripped-down MathType equation editor that was bundled with Office for a while (before it had native math support). The PDF you linked is for Office 2007 onwards and shows that the markup language you mention is mostly like TeX with a few simplifications, e.g. smart handling of things like x^12 which is then actually x¹² instead of x¹2. Basically it uses parentheses where TeX uses braces and needs a lot fewer of them because of more natural tokenizing.

I think you're right. I plan on trying it, next time I need to enter equations into Word. For me, the key to ergonomic use of the computer is being able to look away from the screen. For instance, I can type text forever without constant focused eye contact with the screen, which greatly reduces the eyestrain issue.

And I suppose a useful thing is that if you do misspell one of the keywords, it just sits there until you correct it, as a reminder of what you were trying to write.

The last time I did it couldn't even typeset a root. (The line on top and the thing at the front weren't connected)

And in Powerpoint the formulas have constantly different sizes and are distorted. I don't like beamer (a latex package), but it the only viable slide show software for me.

That must have been a while ago – nowadays it’s just beautiful real-time latex-style math with just a few improvements where the latex syntax kinda fails (“3/4” instead of “\frac{3}{4}”, “"plain"” instead of “\text{plain}”).

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