MathType 6 and TeX, Still the Odd Couple

MathType 6 and TeX, Still the Odd Couple

Design Science came out with MathType 6 the other day. It now supposedly has full support for TeX. For those of you don’t know what MathType and TeX are, MathType is software that allows you to write math equations in Microsoft Word in a graphical environment. (Think math equations for the masses.) TeX is a simple text markup mathematicians and engineers use to typeset equations. (Think obscure and hard-to-use but powerful.)

“What’s the big deal?” you might ask. The “big deal” is that with full TeX support you can have the best of both worlds–-ease of use and uber-productivity. Unfortunately, I found serious issues with MathType 6’s TeX support (see below). The bottom line is that it is NOT worth buying and/or upgrading to MathType 6. Stick to version 5, or if you can find a cheap copy of version 5, then buy that instead.

I downloaded MathType version 6.5c and used it in a production environment for about a month. Here are the problems I found with the TeX support:

• Inline equations are sometimes turned into display equations for no reason. (Display equations are lone equations occupying a single line by themselves. Inline equations “flow” with the text.) MathType randomly turns some equations into display equations when you covert them to TeX. Update (8 April 2009): A helpful MathType programmer got in touch with me the same day this post came out. As we went over the bugs, he pointed out that the author, whose manuscript I was working on, incorrectly created the MathType equations. She flagged them as display equations even though they were in the middle of sentences. After setting them as inline equations, the problem went away. Mystery solved.
• MathType cannot handle systems of equations. When you convert a system of equations to TeX and then back to MathType, you lose the alignment along the = symbol.
• Seemingly random equations do not convert to MathType. For example, the inequality x < 0
• The “Toggle between TeX and MathType” button doesn’t always work. For example, equations inside tables will not convert to TeX. Update (8 April 2009): This is a problem with Office 2003. The Toggle TeX button works in Office 2007.
• Simple symbols like the medium dot operator (multiplication symbol) crash the convertor. Update (8 April 2009): This is actually a problem with TeX. The medium dot operator is not defined in TeX (but it is defined, sort of, in LaTeX).
  

As I said above, I used MathType 6 for about a month. I converted to TeX and then edited the file in Emacs with AucTeX. As expected, working outside of Word was fun and zippy. The bottleneck came when I pasted back to Word and tried to convert to MathType. While the TeX-to-MathType converter worked fine for most simple equations, systems of equations always needed re-editing.

What about the Wikipedia support? It depends on what you mean by “support.” If by support you mean having to cut and paste each equation into MathType, then MathType “supports” Wikipedia. However, I found this approach to be tedious.

Verdict: Unless you are dying to work with TeX, stick with MathType 5. Version 6 does not add to MathType 5 (other than the stuff that doesn’t really work). Stick to version 5 and wait for version 7.