I have been looking at math. editors for years. There's no right
answer -- it just depends on what you want to do. For example, the
journals of the American Mathamatical Society want you to submit
articles in TeX or LaTeX, which is the most powerful tool for such
things, but also the hardest to learn. It's also free if you are VERY
computer literate, or you can get commercial implementations that
offer various degrees of hand-holding. Runs on DOS, Windows, Macs,
Unix, Linux, etc.
A couple years ago there were a number of different equation editors
incorporated into word processors. Now most use a version of
MathType, so I'd at least want to see some reason for prefering one
word processor over another. (I think that installation of the
equation editor is not required, so first look to see if you have it
installed.) I believe that at one point WordPerfect came with two!
The full version of MathType is a more powerful version of Equation
Editor, but it's still an add-on. Last I knew, MathType was available
for Macs, but only in an older version.
There are mathematical word processors such as EXP, Scientific Word
and MathEdit in which mathematics is more fully integrated. (These
are Windows programs. Don't know about Macs.) I use EXP. The math
is nice but the quality of the word processing features are around the
level of Works, and the native file format is readable only by EXP.
However, you can save to LaTeX, which is highly portable across
platforms and infinitely tweakable. All these are pretty expensive.
You can also use something like Mathcad for handouts and such where
you want math. symbols but need very little text formatting power. Of
course, Mathcad can also DO THE MATH for you, in addition to
typesetting it. This too is an expensive solution, but if you need
Mathcad anyway for its number crunching power, there's no additional
cost.
--
_
| | Robert W. Hayden
| | Work: Department of Mathematics
/ | Plymouth State College MSC#29
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