MathType 4. The mathematical equation editor for Windows (Q4948685)

MathType, published by Design Science, Inc., Long Beach, CA, is aimed at the wide range of persons who write mathematics texts, from student to professor, from the occasional writer to the professional. MathType is meant to be an equation editor, i.e. its basic idea is to provide an easy mean to compose formulae of high sophistication without the need of being a TeXnician of the higher grades. The software is available for both, computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintoshes. MathType is used alongside other applications like Word, Word Perfect and many popular editors and other applications. You may include graphical representations into your texts, however, a major purpose of MathType is to prepare fine equations to be included into TeX (and LaTeX) texts. This is done by translating them from MathType internal format into TeX, LaTeX, and, a recent standard, MathML. You can also save equations generated with MathType in several graphics formats, among others Windows Metafile, Encapsulated PostScript, or GIF. To cope with typographically demanding equations the user can make use of a lot of items that can be drawn from several pulldown menues and which cover most of the needs of a usual writer in mathematics. Thus, typesetting symbols and operators is made pretty easy and less errorprone as compared to keying in those long TeX controls by hand. The user will soon get a feeling for which equations are easier to compose with MathType and then to be pasted into the text and which ones are just simple enough to be typed by hand. With respect to TeX and the idea behind it, to make mathematics text available in the whole community, MathType serves in some sense the role of a standardization tool as it prevents authors from creating new presentation approaches with every new formula. MathType thus plays its role in gaining typographically high quality for ever more mathematics writers.