General Disarray

[Disclaimer: I know, I'm obsessed with equation editing. Sorry.]

After some additional investigation, I’m really impressed with the equation editing functions. For the first time ever, equation editing has been completely and thoughtfully integrated into a standard word processing application.

To insert an equation, you just hit alt+=. From there, you can use most LaTeX commands. For example, typing

\sum_i^n

creates the expected LaTeX expresssion:

You have to mess around with the arrow keys to get Word to understand where arguments go relative to operators, but this is true of LyX, too. The \frac{}{} command doesn’t work. Instead, when you want to type a fraction, there’s a small dropdown menu on the right of the equation box, from which you can select Professional or Inline to set the fraction style. I’m sure that there are other idiosyncracies that will be frustrating at first (or maybe forever).

Still, setting aside programs designed specifically for scientific composition (like LaTeX or LaTeX-based systems such as Scientific Word and LyX), the new equations implementation in Word is the best I’ve seen. It allows those that know LaTeX to quickly enter and edit formulas, but it doesn’t lock those who don’t out by scaring them with a markup language (ala OpenOffice.org). The only obvious improvement that I can think of would be to include a “view source” function to allow tweaking and ture expert editing (ala every graphical HTML editor ever made, including the one I’m using to type this post). But then again, I think every graphical application should have a view source mode (wouldn’t it be nice if you could tweak the source in Word to like it was HTML?).

I can’t wait until the next version of Office:Mac is out. I hope I get to beta test that, too.