Design Science News

MathPlayer 2.2 Released

MathPlayer is by far and away the most used MathML renderer around -- in the 27 months since MathPlayer 2.1 was released, 615 million expressions on 29 million pages have been rendered by MathPlayer! I'm happy to say that we've only had a few bug reports since 2.1 was released, some of which were fixed with intervening bug fix releases. We've fixed many of the remaining ones with this release of MathPlayer 2.2. We've also taken some big steps in 2.2 to improve our font support. When the STIX fonts are finally released in a month or two, MathPlayer 2.2 will be able to make use of them.  Even without them, our improved font support makes expressions look much better, as you can see in the screen shots below:

      
  MathPlayer 2.1 vs. MathPlayer 2.2

One thing that hasn't changed with MathPlayer 2.2 is its price -- it's still free. You can update your version of MathPlayer by visiting our MathPlayer downloads page.

New MathType 6.6 brings math support to over 350 applications and websites

We just released MathType 6.6 for Windows, which features handwritten math entered using mouse, tablet or touchscreen (for Windows 7 users) as well as compatibility with over 350 applications and websites in areas such as education, elearning, calculation, word processing, presentation, email, blogs and wikis. Among the newly supported applications and websites are Google Docs, Gmail, Blackboard and many others.

We have been working hard on our Equations Everywhere and Anywhere!™ initiative. Our plan is to make MathType work with virtually all applications and websites used by students, teachers, professors, elearning authors, scientists, and engineers. Go visit our "Works With ..." web application to see if your favorite applications are already in our database. If you don't find your favorite application or website, or want to give us feedback in general, let us know by emailing  interop@dessci.com or on Twitter @MathType. We value your feedback!

Oxygen XML Editor 11 adds MathFlow support

Do you use Oxygen XML Editor or XML Author? To our pleasure the latest release of Oxygen XML Editor and Author introduces MathFlow support. MathFlow adds powerful MathML editing capabilities to the Oxygen XML suite, including features such as a customizable toolbar, default font settings, and a customizable operator dictionary. Oxygen's integration works with all three MathFlow editors, allowing you to choose the right one based on the needs of your project.

If you're interested in evaluating or purchasing a license for MathFlow for Oxygen XML Editor and Author 11, please contact us.

If you're interested in adding MathFlow equation support to your application, see our website for more information about the MathFlow Components.

MathML 3 is getting close, adds elementary math notation and more

MathML 3 took a big step towards becoming a standard by moving to "last call" a week ago, the first of three steps towards becoming an official W3C recommendation.  Design Science is a leader in developing MathML technology with its MathPlayer renderer for IE, its MathFlow products, and MathType's ability to import and export MathML. We've worked hard to expand MathML to handle areas where our customers have requested more functionality.

MathML 3 cleans up a number of unclear areas and adds a number of new features.  In this post, I want to talk about two big new features in MathML 3:  support for linebreaking and support for elementary math notations.  MathML 3 adds extensive support for linebreaks and the indentation that follows.  You can use this to achieve all different sorts of alignment of the next line.  For example, in the image below, two linebreaks were forced.  The alignment points were tagged with ids and at the forced linebreak, the indentation target was given as the ids:

This is an example of forced linebreaks, but the same can be done for automatic linebreaks:  if the expression breaks at a certain point, you can tell it where it should align.  The image above was generated by the development version of MathPlayer, which has full support for MathML 3's linebreaking specification including automatic linebreaking.

Another big new feature is support for elementary notations like those shown below:

                

Elementary math notation is notoriously hard to lay out, but MathML 3 makes it easy. It has lots of flexibility for the position of the borrows, carries, and location of the operator to accommodate the many styles used in the US and around the world.  One very big advantage of a clear markup for elementary math is the ability to make it accessible, something we are constantly working on.

We've been hard at work implementing MathML 3 support in our products -- all of the images in this post were generated by MathPlayer -- and we are looking forward to the impending release of MathML 3.

Working with Windows 7? We'd like you to beta test MathType!

Design Science is currently looking for beta testers who are working with the pre-release installation of Microsoft Windows 7.

If you're interested, please send an email to beta@dessci.com.

Thanks,
The Beta Team
Design Science, Inc.

Design Science is currently looking for beta testers who are working with the pre-release installation of Microsoft Windows 7.

If you're interested, please send an email to beta@dessci.com.

Thanks,
The Beta Team
Design Science, Inc.