[K12OSN] Writing Math Equations

[Gentgeen]

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:41:42 -0800
Huck <dhuckaby at paasda.org> wrote:

> Latex
> 
> 
> David Trask wrote:
> > I have a teacher who wants to be able to write math equations that
> > set up properly...just like in a textbook...in other words fractions
> > show up as one number over another number instead of using forward
> > or back slashes.  Anyone know of a way to accomplish this?  Font,
> > program...web site?  She's using Mac OS X, but we're open to
> > anything.
> > 
> > David N. Trask
> > Technology Teacher/Director
> > Vassalboro Community School
> > dtrask at vcsvikings.org
> > (207)923-3100
> > 
> > 


Latex is ideal, but probably not exactly "user friendly". Depending on
your user of course.

What you end up using is really based on what you need as a final
product.  If your talking about just righting up the occasional test,
then OpenOffice and the Equation editor will do just fine.  (I
understand that AbiWord also has plug-in, but not familiar with it) In
OpenOffice, just go to "Insert - Object - Formula"

Now if you are writing a book, the benefits of Latex would out weigh the
time it takes to learn.

If you want something for a website, well that might be a bit harder. 
You can do a kind of "Latex to PostScript to GIF file" kind of
conversion, or some other crazy thing to get the math stuff into a 
graphics file.  There is also MathML (http://www.w3.org/Math/), but I am
not at all familiar with it, and not all browser's can handle it by
default.

Being primarily a math teacher, I have looked into this 100 times over
the years.  I tend towards using OpenOffice most of the time.  But due
to necessary, I have found myself slowly learning Latex.

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