Math Input

[pdejong]

Is it possible to make Affinity Designer suitable for use with Windows Math Input Panel?  To make slides or ilustrations with mathematical formulas for scientific publications and presentations.

 

'Math Input Panel outputs equations in MathML format. MS Word, its OpenOffice analog, and some other software do render MathML.'

 

 

Edited January 4, 2018 by pdejong

[MEB]

Hi Pieterdj,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

Affinity Designer (and Photo) supports maths operations/expressions on most input fields - check this link for more info. What do you intend to achieve exactly?

[v_kyr]

@MEB

I think the OP means together with this Windows one here as/for defining the input instead!

[MEB]

Yes, i understood it. But what's the point? Just to input expressions with a pen/tablet?

[John Rostron]

I have just tried this in Photo to insert a formula into Filter > Distort > Equations.  I click on the Equation position, then when I create a formula in the Math Input Panel and click on Insert, nothing happens. 

I doubt that this would work in other locations where an expression is needed in either AP or AD. The Math Input Panel looks as if it for inserting characters/text. So, it might work with Artistic or Frame Text.

John

[v_kyr]

I think that in order to make any use out of this apps must have been build up with MathML or Mathematical Markup Language support here, which to my knowledge is only supported by very few office suites and specific apps for Win at all.

[John Rostron]

17 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

I think that in order to make any use out of this apps must have been build up with MathML or Mathematical Markup Language support here, which to my knowledge is only supported by very few office suites and specific apps for Win at all.

And if Affinity were to go that route, I would see it an input to Artistic/Frame Text rather than input to expressions. I shall not, however, be proposing it as a Feature Request.

John

[v_kyr]

Well now where I thought about it, AFAI remember things like MathML etc. are mostly used for writing mathematical expressions (greetings to EQN, TeX/LaTEX etc. here) which then are taken over into text processor software. So the widest usage of these nowadays might be more useful for apps like MS Word, Apple Pages, Libre Office, FrameMaker... and things like those where you want to write and include mathematical written formulars.

MathML itself is available for all OS so it's usually nothing only Win specific here. However don't know or can't tell if people have a need for this in Designer, aka being able to include mathematical written and rendered formulars there. - Related to small AD/AP input fields I don't think that these are well suited for such input and the normal AD/AF text input methods would then probably need some clever parsing methods for such a mathematical markup language.

[pdejong]

See for instance https://www.researchgate.net/post/Which_software_do_you_use_to_make_vector_illustrations_for_your_papers: "Which software do you use to make vector illustrations for your papers? Most Latex and non-Latex scientific writers are more and more concerned about the quality of the illustrations that they put in their papers." 

 

[v_kyr]

Honestly I seldom had to include in the past math equations as illustrations into things like flyers, brochures etc. - Instead I only tended to use these when writing thesis and longer technical papers where the underlaying math for some used algorithms had to be explained. Also since those things I wrote then were longer texts (much more pages) and I didn't wanted to mess up things like headers, footers, footnotes, literature references... with Word etc. then, I've always used FrameMaker for these texts, which already also has a build-in language (similar to TeX/LaTeX) for writing extensive math formular stuff.

If I would have to do it for small page brochures, I would use some publishing software which supports this, or where some math writing add-ons are available for. Otherwise if needed as independent portable vectors, I would look around for some tools which can generate hopefully reusable SVG out of math equations and formulars. - Don't know but I can imagine that probably among the LibreOffice suite there might be some tools or add-ons, which can be used with their Draw app etc. Or the TeX/LaTeX community might have something too here (?) for creating vectors out of TeX.

See also: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Math_Tools