LaTeX Math in MS Office | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX Math in MS Office

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

202 pointsygra55 comments

This is great to see, although it sounds like it's still somewhat in beta. Be interesting to find out if they support packages such as amsmath, either now or in the future.

As a shameless plug, for anyone wanting to use LaTeX without having to install everything locally, the online compilers Overleaf [1] and ShareLaTeX [2] are pretty handy. I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, and we're excited to now be working together with the ShareLaTeX team [3]. Feedback always appreciated :)

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/

[2] https://www.sharelatex.com/

[3] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-i...

Happy sharelatex user here. I'd say one of the essential advantages is rock solid simultaneous editing. I converted a couple of word users and they were instantly hooked. On a tight deadline, no less! Saved our ass in the end - the slowness of working serially in word would have meant missing the deadline.

I highly prefer LaTeX (and Markdown via pandoc) for writing, but Word does not require you to work serially. If you store a document on OneDrive (or SharePoint I guess), you can edit a document with multiple people simultaneously. Both from Word Online and Word on your PC/Mac.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word...

We've tried using it, as have other peopke I know. There are serious limitations to it. In practice I'd call it vapourware. Sharelatex delivers. In a SW dev team, markdown/latex+git also works great.

There's a huge difference between "use this specific cloud service" and "use anything that can diff text".

"use this specific cloud service" that most large companies and universities are adopting. And with a GUI that's much more familiar to non-programmers.

Multiple authors collaborating on documents seems to work pretty well on SharePoint Online and the latest version of Word - I did have some problems with this in the past but seems pretty solid now.

NB I do prefer working with something like git - but for collaborating with people who are never going to use git (even with a GUI) - particularly sales and marketing folks - it is very useful.

Neither does markdown. Just put it in a git repo.

This is not actual LaTeX document support. It's just the math portion of it, same as in, e.g., MathJax. So LaTeX packages will likely not ever be supported, this is only a convenience for people who'd like to write math as in LaTeX instead of UnicodeMath.

Apple did this and MS is following. Is there something going on with MathType? Has it fallen on the radar?

Microsoft seems to be particularly trying to push people to UnicodeMath [1][2] as a standard math exchange format. It sounds like from the blog post that (La)TeX math support is almost a "free" bonus given UnicodeMath is somewhat based on TeX prefix patterns (but as Unicode characters and joiners as much as possible) and the UnicodeMath standard supports a somewhat trivial conversion between the two.

[1] http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.1.p...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2016/09/07/unicodem...

I think MathType still exists, but since it works by embedding an OLE object into the document there are limits in how well it integrates with other features of the platform. It's the equivalent of having to insert equations as images in LaTeX and editing them via a different application. Change your document font and the equations won't care, change font size or colour and the equations won't care, etc.

Microsoft Equation Editor (effectively, MathType demo version) was deprecated in Office 2007 and replaced by a new custom system, that has supported AutoCorrect for TeX (eg. \pi → π) for quite some time, and that looks much better than MathType ever did.

I wonder if Microsoft is going to try to "embrace and extend" LaTeX as they as they have with so many other technologies and standards over the years.

They will, intentionally or not. Many think of EEE as of an evil plot, but in reality that's just like all NIH-oriented companies work. Canonical is the same. They take something and after that they make some in-house "improvements" without any care of standards, because they treat every piece of technology as their own, part of their product, and voila, we have a new non-compatible technology. It's cultural, they just can't do it in any other way, even when they make some MIT-licensed OSS.

The difference is that Canonical know when their time is up. Microsoft will steam roll everyone with marketing, blogs and noise.

The example formula in the article looks ugly. It looks like Microsoft Office doesn't support beautiful math formulas using TeX's typesetting engine and TeX's math fonts. https://www.mathjax.org/ can do it on the web.

Huh? The example formula looks great. I really can't fault it. I think maybe you just don't like the font, Cambria Math.

I don't particularly like the font, although I only really object to the theta.

There are other nitpicks: The pi looks too italic to me, though I can't really say its wrong (whatever "wrong" means). The spacing between the integral sign and the integrand is too big -- but this is a common problem even in real LaTex.

Overall, it looks decent but just not as nice as the maths that TeX has been pumping out for decades now.

As long as we're nitpicking, the d in front of the theta shouldn't really be italicizes, anyway. I'd class that more as an input error than an output error, though.

Actually, many mathematics authors use an italic d while the upright d convention is standard in physics and engineering.

Is that to disambiguate it from the upright d in exterior calculus?

That would be funny, as that symbol was chosen specifically to overload with the traditional little-d notation from Leibniz.

Don't tell them that Microsoft developed the OpenType Math specification that LuaTeX uses.

The square root denominator looks too low to me. It makes the whole thing look lopsided. The TeX version looks better to me: http://latex2png.com/output//latex_9c2d6d68604c4a04a90acc777...

WSL and now Tex. Some real embracing happening as of late.

The MacBook Air being ridiculously noncompetitive and the recent hike in price for the MacBook and the MacBook Pro totally changed the college laptop market.

For the last 10 years+ almost everyone in CS had a Mac from the start or bought one along the way. I'm starting to think this trend will end due to the price hike.

That means that a bunch of new students will use WSL instead of doing their Linux based homework using MacOS *NIX utilities. Adding native LaTeX support in word further makes the platform very attractive for that kind of demographic.

When looking at SV, I see most startups and devs working with Macs. This makes sense as it was probably on Macs that the earliest version of their product was developed. Often the Mac version is the first class version of the app and the windows port often an afterthought. Just look at Node.js that was originally a Mac/Linux exclusive. I think Microsoft want to change that.

Nope, just following Apple's support in Pages!

This was added to Pages earlier this year too.[0] I wonder what prompted these features, other than the fact that clicking around to enter equations is a memorable pain.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207569

though not Keynote (yet?)

Mac's in-built but largely unknown Grapher app has the best equation editor I've used. Super easier to use, automatic sub/superscripting, and you can right-click to copy as LaTeX.

Makes me sad that Grapher seems to be abandoned -- Apple invests a lot in pro apps, and consumer apps like Garageband. Where's the love for science/math? Surely the market is as large as the market for, say, musicians? There are a lot of engineers/scientists out there.

Math / science folks need to rebrand as "Creators" to get some love from Apple.

As a workaround, you _can_ copy and paste equations between Pages and Keynote. It even round trips in the sense that you can edit an equation that was copy-pasted to Keynote by copying it back to Pages.

This is really useful, thank you!

As much as I love Keynote it'd be sooo useful to have native equation support, and native code syntax highlighting (can't they port this from XCode?)

It's been abandoned for quite some time.

Apple is slowly pulling out of academia, where they used to shine quite well.

Yeah, that's really sad. If Apple wants to get back into this, they'd be welcomed with open arms.

If Grapher ever gets abandoned, I really hope they open source it. An update for the icons to be retina-ready, and moving the backend to Metal, and maybe easier integration into Keynote/Pages, would be all it needs to make a kiss-ass product. It'd be so far beyond anything anywhere else. Can you imagine how nice it would be for students to easily be able to embed/edit mathematical graphs into their documents?

It's crazy, there's a whole generation of people who grew up with graphing calculators, and yet it's such an ordeal to do something similar in Pages or Numbers right now.

> other than the fact that clicking around to enter equations is a memorable pain.

Office had full support for keyboard-only equations for 10 years now. What's new here is support for the exact latex synatax (which imho is worse than the office syntax).

Joke was that they needed it so that they could make their WWDC slides this year.

Funny that, now it has Latex math but not even cross-references yet if I'm not mistaken. If it had that I'd love to just use Pages for simple academic stuff, but as-is it's pretty much useless.

LibreOffice has had this for some time:

http://roland65.free.fr/texmaths/

I do most of my serious typesetting in LyX, so I haven't done much with TeXMaths, but I've used it a little bit. It seems pretty nice: you can have a custom preamble and custom packages (although you'll probably have to link the .sty files you need into the directory where the document lives).

I have been waiting so long for this. For PPT it's unfortunately still a bit annoying to enable latex, but I believe MSFT is actively working to fix this.

Is Microsoft Word able to break the line automatically in a long sum (if entered as a math formula), e.g. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 16 + 17 + 18 + 19 + 20? Is Microsoft Word able to stretch the spaces around the + sign in the math formula to better suit the justified alignment of the paragraph? TeX has been able to do these since the late 1970s.

Word has had both these features for 10 years now.

> Is Microsoft Word able to break the line automatically in a long sum?

Yes. It can automatically infer alignments for broken equations too, something TeX cannot do.

> Is Microsoft Word able to stretch the spaces around the + sign in the math formula to better suit the justified alignment of the paragraph?

Yes. It can also stretch within nested math items, such as \left\right brackets, which TeX cannot do.

Most importantly, does Microsoft Word support TeX macros? Because I'm not going to type a long sequence of commands every time I want a mathematical symbol in bold face.

There is auto-correct as an alternative to parameterless macros, otherwise no, as far as I know, although the last version I've used was 2010.

It probably won't support Tex macros, but Word has input macros and autocorrect, so you will be able to get your bold symbol in probably less keystrokes than in latex.

Microsoft must be on a LaTex kick at the moment. I just noticed there is a Microsoft language plugin for LaTex for VS Code. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

"Microsoft" is a collection of 120000 individuals, many of which have used LaTeX for many years themselves (or still are).

Heck, one of them is the La of LaTeX ;-)

Not just them, apple recently added latex support to pages on both ios and mac. For some reason they omitted keynote, but you can still write them in pages and copy to keynote, so there is some support.

Math input is the sole reason my school has to keep using Microsoft products. I'm really surprised Google has neglected this so long; while in the meantime MS has caught up in a lot of features (indeed, leapfrogged in some), and we look to shifting back to MS to maintain a unified platform.

Is this Windows-only? I'm not seeing it on macOS.

It says it'll be up next month.

Win10/Office 2016 and I'm not seeing it either, checked for update too.

Finally! Good job MicroSoft.

if one could use LaTex in office it would beg the question why not just use Latex instead..

Dear Windows, while you're at it, could you please make home folder encryption available in Windows Home? Because limiting that to Pro is really mean.

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