Affinity Publisher Equations and importing

[Todd Ehlers]

I'm considering buying Affinity publisher.  I have three questions:

1) Can publisher import an MS Word or Apple Pages document with equations in it and preserve the equations nicely without pixelating the equations?

2) Can publisher import Apple Pages documents?.

3) Does publisher work with an equation editor like Math Type, accept or LaTex commands for writing equations?

Thanks.  -TE

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Todd Ehlers.

1. Sorry, I don't know. Are the equations some form of image within the Word file, or are they something else? If images, it should work, but I haven't tried it to say for sure. Can you provide a sample file? (Or, maybe someone else will know )
2. Not that I have heard.
3. No, though I suppose it might be able to sometime in the future, depending on Serif's development priorities.

[Callum]

14 hours ago, Todd Ehlers said:

I'm considering buying Affinity publisher.  I have three questions:

1) Can publisher import an MS Word or Apple Pages document with equations in it and preserve the equations nicely without pixelating the equations?

2) Can publisher import Apple Pages documents?.

3) Does publisher work with an equation editor like Math Type, accept or LaTex commands for writing equations?

Thanks.  -TE

Hi Todd provided the equations are text I think they should look fine when imported.

Thanks

C

[Todd Ehlers]

Thanks both of you for your responses.  It sounds like Affinity Publisher doesn't have this clearly integrated yet.  In MS Word or Pages equations can be inserted via the program Mathtype (which provides the equations in the text and editable by double clicking), or via using LaTex commands.  Both approaches (MathType or LaTex) produce equations that can be a graphic, or retain their properties in the document (so you can double click and edit them).  
What is not good is when software imports the equations as a graphic (uneditable).  This is for example what happens to equations in Word, Pages, or LibreOffice when you import the document from one program to another.  Having the equations as a graphic means they can not be edited if you for example want to change font size or type.  So, if Affinity Publisher is not clearly stating they handle equations (via MathType, LaTex, or their own interface) then it's no-go for scientific desktop publishing at this time.  I hope this makes sense.  Best wishes, TE 

[GarryP]

Todd, have a look at this thread...

where I give an example of an equation done in Publisher. It’s not a good solution for scientific documents that have lots of equations but it could be a stop-gap for when you only need to do a few equations that won’t change much.

Note: That thread also gives an example of using MiKTeX to create importable PDFs.

Edited July 21, 2019 by GarryP
Added extra note.

[v_kyr]

Well some MathML support for the future wouldn't be bad to have here. FrameMaker for example uses MathFlow in order to handle this in a flexible editable manner ...

• MathML Equations in Structured Files

• Improved support for inline MathML equations

• MathML Equations in Unstructured Documents