🚀 go-pugleaf

jimk@mathtype.com (Jim King) wrote:

> Wilfred,
> 
> I read this group pretty regularly just to keep up on what the TeX
> community is looking for and working on. In your FAQ on TeX conversion,
> you quote the a letter from Yong Kim about our product (quoted below). 
> While I know your FAQ is not an official publication, just your own
> personal collection of experiences, I would like to point out that Mr.
> Kim's quoted message below is not entirely factual in its representation
> of MathType's TeX abilities.
> 
> MathType does in fact have the ability to convert all the equations in a
> Word document to TeX.  Currently we are converting to plain TeX rather
> than LaTeX, but we hope to add to this in the future.  Mr. Kim's statement
> that we only generate our own propriatary code is false.  We generate
> normal plain TeX, with a comment added to the front which ALSO contains
> our propriatary code.  This comment is added because MathType at this time
> does NOT have the ability to import TeX.  To get around this, you can copy
> a TeX expression with our comment, and MathType will read the comment to
> determine what the equation is.  So at this moment, our translator is
> essentially one-and-a-half way.  It was created primarily to help Word
> users who need to convert their documents to Tex, but we felt that adding
> this comment in addition to the TeX code would be useful for people who
> may want to take the equation back to a graphical editor.  Unfortunately,
> it is a common mistake for users to see the comment and miss the TeX code
> right after it, thus assuming that the comment is all there is.  I've
> already taken this problem to heart and am hoping to rewrite this part of
> our manual to make it a bit more clear.
> 
> The equations we create are, in fact, compatible with the Equation Editor
> 2.0 that is included in Word.  We wrote that equation editor, and MathType
> and Equation Editor share the same data format, so there is no
> compatibility or conversion needed.  MathType and Equation Editor 1.0 do
> use one additional font that is not used with Equation Editor 2.0, but all
> a user needs to do to have those equaitons appear correctly on a computer
> which does not have MathType is install that font, called Fences.  This
> font can even be embedded with the document by Word.
> 
> I am sorry that Mr. Kim's experiences were not the best, but as the person
> that oversees our support department I can guerentee that we are VERY
> willing to help users with issues such as this.  If Mr. Kim had called or
> written to our support department, not only would we have happily shown
> him where the TeX code was in the output that we generated, but we also
> offer a money back guerentee in case he was still unhappy.  We pride
> ourselves on not having to take many back, but we prepared to if the
> product doesn't meet the customer's needs.

Jim, 
thank you for your suggestion. I thing Kim's quotation stayed in 
the "FAQ" list for historical reasons. As you see, I had already 
added MY statement saying that MathType IS able to convert
TO TeX as well as to and from WinWord's equation editor format
(merely a question of OLE2 to OLE1 and backward).
I now decided to delete Kim's letter completely from the FAQ
and just keep my own comment.
The changed FAQ will used for the next posting
and is also on <http://www.kfa-juelich.de/isr/1/texconv.html>

Regards,

Dipl.-Ing. Wilfried Hennings c./o. 
Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH (KFA), ISR 
D-52425 Juelich, Germany 
Tel. (+49) 2461 61 5570 ; Fax (+49) 2461 61 3133 
http://www.kfa-juelich.de/
All opinions mentioned are strictly my own.