Math writing programs?

[spacecat27]

Before I go snooping around the web and get really confused at all the options.....
Wonder if Bob, Don, or anyone here has a favorite program for writing math expressions?
That is, something that will allow you to do multi-level bracketing, square root, summation, integral signs, etc.
Do they work as an add-on to existing word processing like "Word?" ...Or do you have to write the equations separate and insert them into a document?
And- are there any free downloads for this that are worthwhile?

[DonPMitchell]

I've always used MathType ( http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ ).

Math typesetting is sort of a lost art.  LaTex was once alleged to do the best job of computer typesetting of math.  At Bell Labs, a friend and I were doing a project with resultants, and we found an 1860-something article by Cayley on the topic.  Oh my god, we were amazed by how complex matrix algebra expressions had been beautifully typeset...by some old guy at the Royal Society working with molten lead.

[Bob B.]

I haven't found anything like that, spacecat27.  For my web site, I do all the math expressions as images and insert them into the page.

[spacecat27]

Thanks, guys!
I'll probably end up going Bob's route since it's not something I use often enough to justify buying more software than I need.
Don- wow, I hadn't thought of the history there- and I can appreciate it more than most.  First year of high school (ahem... 1963, 64 or so) I took a six-week 'exposure to printing processes' course.  They started us out setting letter by letter on a 'stick' from a 'California Job Case'.... and worked us up to 'Linotype Machines'- huge electromechanical monsters with a keyboard and lead pot that could kick out a line at a time.  Linotypes put the Harris Corporation on the map back then- I don't think anyone else ever built them.  Since every newspaper had to have one- and big papers had many- Harris was the Microsoft of their time.

[Satanic Mechanic]

Matlab would be good but I have not used it in years.  I usually plug stuff into spreadsheets now.

SM

[Homo bibiens]

The thread is a bit old, so maybe you have already found an acceptable solution, but I always use LaTeX, which is what a lot of scientific papers get written in.

http://www.latex-project.org/

LaTeX itself is not a software product, but a specification, and a number of LaTeX compilers have been written.  Most editors for LaTeX (and you can use just an ordinary text editor) are definitely not what-you-see-is-what-you-get, although some head a little bit in that direction.  Relative to MS Word, it will be much less user friendly, so for someone who wants to write something up quickly and then never do it again, I wouldn't bother.  But someone who will be a repeated, heavy producer of scientific documents with lots of maths might want to consider.  I've gotten to the point where if I even write a one page letter to someone, I do it in LaTeX, although I think most users won't be that extreme.

[DonPMitchell]

Latex is pretty old fashion technology.  I used to use Troff, and I just can't imagine doing document layout like that now.  It's math typesetting is pretty good, but I wonder if MathType isn't just as good these days.  MathType gets used for generating HTML, with Microsoft Word and even by some Latex authors.

For my book, I explored several programs, mostly with an eye on how well they justified text in columns.  I tested Quark Express, Adobe Indesign, Word 2007, and Open Office.

Quark Express and Indesign are standards for industrial layout, but they are expensive, and I found Indesign's user interface impossible to figure out.  Everything Adobe makes seems to look like Photoshop, whether or not that UI paradigm maps to the problem at hand.

Word looks great these days, particularly if you tell it to use wordperfect justification rules (which gives it more latitude on interword spacing).  I'm using Word for my book.

Open Office did EXACTLY the same thing as old versions of Word -- pixel for pixel the same.  I was kind of amazed.  It's a resource hog too, much slower and much bigger memory footprint than MS Offi e, so forget it.

[LunarOrbit]

I'm using Word for my book.

Won't the publisher just convert your Word files to whatever program they use when printing your book?

[DonPMitchell]

I'm doing layout myself.  When it's done, you send PDF to the publisher, and they feed that right into the printers.  For example, lulu.com

I might change my mind about that though and just send a manuscript and pictuers to a real publisher.  In that case, they are likely to use Quark or Indesign.

[Homo bibiens]

Latex is pretty old fashion technology.

Well, it is, but it is still very widely used.

I used to use Troff, and I just can't imagine doing document layout like that now.

I don't really know the history of the various *roff programs, although I did use one of them myself once.  I have the impression that LaTeX came along and replaced them, but maybe my timeline is incorrect here.  But in any event, LaTeX is the specification of the document, not the editor.  There are a lot of editors that, to varying degrees, hide the LaTeX code from you, although I don't think any of them approach the level of what-you-see-is-what-you-get that Micrsoft Word or similar products offer.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who think LaTeX is too newfangled, and hides too much from you, and use Plain TeX 

[DonPMitchell]

Troff and Knuth's TeX programs are roughly contemporary.  Troff had some advantages, it was more sophisticated about how equations, pictures and tables interworked.  Two problems occured though, first the man who wrote Troff was killed in a car accident, and the complex program was never again fully undstood by anyone.  He wrote it in PDP-11 assembly langauge, so when it was translated into C, it literally looked like "int r0, r1, r2, r3, r4;".  Secondly, Bell Labs decided to make UNIX more proprietary and stopped releasing new versions of Troff to the public, and the open source versions like groff were never well maintained.  I was lucky to be able to use the internal version of Troff, which had some cool new features (like an organic molecule typsetter, and such things), but the outside world never saw that stuff.