Talk:Microsoft Equation Editor

(Comments not given a heading)
From usage and numerous statements from Murray Sargent et al. it looks rather like the Office 2007 Math editing capabilities are no longer based on the legacy Equation Editor. Neither the old interface nor the old layout engine are present anymore. This does (in my opinion) strongly suggest that the old code isn't used here. --Joey 23:03, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

While it is true that the new Office 2007 math editing capabilities are not based on my company's Equation Editor or MathType, the "old" Equation Editor is still shipped with Office and is used to support equations in legacy documents, a preferred editing UI for some, and also because it works in many more apps than the new feature. For example, Equation Editor works in PowerPoint. Finally, Equation Editor is still shipped with Mac Office as it does not contain their new feature. PaulTopping (talk) 17:18, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

This page starts by defining Equation Editor as both the old equation editing feature in Office and the new one added in Office 2007. While the former is an application with the name Equation Editor and is named as such in Microsoft Office user documentation, the new feature is never called "Equation Editor" anywhere but here. This appears to be a thinly veiled attempt at promoting the new feature at the expense of the original and still current Equation Editor. In fact, Microsoft Office 2007 ships with both the old Equation Editor and the new feature so they both can't be given this name in all honesty. PaulTopping (talk) 17:26, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Every wikipedia article on softwares written by the company "design science" looks exactly like an advertisement. If the company is editing its own articles, it is sad. That, coupled with the tone of the articles is a violation of several wikipedia polities, like coi, advert, notability. Deego (talk) 17:46, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Deego, if you have specific objections to the language, we would like to correct them. PaulTopping (talk) 17:21, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

mistakes
Microsoft Equation Editor isn't included in all packages, it is included with Microsoft Word only. Excel already allows to you to simple things, and macros programming so Microsoft doesn't care about it. PowerPoint & Publisher usually doesn't use it. --Ramu50 (talk) 23:33, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

sources missing
I read this:

Its feature set has not changed significantly since its introduction in Word for Windows, version 2.0.

and I do not agree. I think, especially the latest step from office 2003 to office 2007 was a very large one. Linear input was not supported before, the output quality has been improved dramatically (e.g. we have an inline / block equation difference and the integral symbol looks less like    &int;     than $$\int$$) and more symbols are available, e.g. sets like $$\mathbb{N}$$. Unless there are official sources from Microsoft or DesignScience, I think this should be changed immediately. --87.172.244.232 (talk) 13:41, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

misrepresentation in the image?
is it just me, or is the picture showing the new o2k7 "equation builder" while the article is about the obsolete "equation editor" ? Am I correct in making the distinction? 58.246.141.67 (talk) 13:11, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

bugs and workarounds
A very common problem with equations in docx files using Equation Editor is that the equations don't print in many installations. There is a solution which I've applied successfully but forgot and can't find. It should probably be mentioned here since it's so prevalent that many colleagues don't use the new equation editor - they replace it with the old one, but with a certain foreign font (Thai or something Asian) it seems it clears up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.115.13.21 (talk) 15:39, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

MathType-derived equation editor vs. the new editor built into Office
The article was ambiguous about what this article was about: either the old editor made by Design Science, or all equation editing capabilities in Office, including the new editor. Since the term "Microsoft Equation Editor" exclusively means the old editor, I went ahead and deleted stuff about the new system. It should still be mentioned somewhere, but not in this article. Here is the material I deleted:

For Microsoft Office 2007, Equation Editor is included as is, however some Office 2007 applications also include a reengineered equation editor with support for a TeX-like linear input/edit language called "Office Math Markup Language" (Office MathML or OMML) in addition to its WYSIWYG interface. In Microsoft Office 2010 the new equation editing system is used throughout all Microsoft Office applications, and The revised equation editor is built into the document-editing part of the interface rather than being operated through a separate dialog and being treated as an OLE object in the document. Unicode Plain Text Encoding of Mathematics is also supported. Office Math Markup Language (OMML) is a mathematical markup language embedded in WordProcessingML, with intrinsic support for including word processing markup like revision markings, footnotes, comments, images and elaborate formatting and styles. Equation number management is also possible using macros.

By the way, this article is quite short, and rightly so: there's not much to say about it. So maybe it would be a good idea to merge this (with redirect) into MathType? Quietbritishjim (talk) 02:11, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Format compatibility
The OMML format is different from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) MathML recommendation. Academic publishers have noted that the rendering of equations as graphics in .DOCX files impairs its usability for scholarly publishing as the conversion to and from MathML to OMML while converting between DOC and DOCX is not seamless and automatic. Especially, when saving DOC files using Word 2007, equations are rendered as graphics as the older DOC format as well as older versions of Office do not support OMML, which prevents editing and flexibly printing the equations. OMML is partially compatible with MathML through relatively simple XSL Transformations. Word 2007 has support for converting equations to/from MathML via the clipboard. Copied equations are in (Presentation) MathML format, so they can be pasted into other programs that understand this XML markup, such as Mathematica. Conversely, MathML can also be pasted into a Word document and it will be recognized as an equation and displayed properly (as long as it does not contain MathML symbolic character entities such as ± — numeric entities must be used instead). The transformations that allow copying/pasting equations via MathML are driven by two XSL stylesheets (omml2mml.xsl and mml2omml.xsl). These scripts can be used outside of Word by reading or manipulating DOCX XML files directly.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac does not currently support OMML. This is supported in Office 2011.

Quietbritishjim (talk) 02:08, 3 August 2011 (UTC)