Thanks, as always, to everyone for a thoughtful discussion!
Martin Montgomery suggested trying the beta release of the upcoming Office for
Mac suite. I installed this (which required carrying out the update to
Yosemite that I had been putting off), and it turns out that rather than fixing
the bug with Equation Editor (i.e. the one based on the MathType software),
Microsoft removed that option and all that is left is their built-in equation
tool (which it turns out is based on MathML markup)! So it looks like anyone
who likes the Equation Editor will either have to cough up for a licence for
the fully-featured MathType (which creates its own problems collaborating with
people who don't have a licence) or learn to use an alternative.
A few people (Robbie Joosten, Klaus Fütterer and Shing Ho) suggested that I
should bite the bullet and learn how to use the built-in equation tool. I had
tried this and found it unintuitive compared to the Equation Editor, but maybe
that's just because I haven't put in anything like the same amount of time
learning it. This is probably going to be the way I'll go, mostly for
compatibility with collaborators (who are almost all using Word without special
plugins) but partly for journal typesetting considerations mentioned below.
As I said before, collaboration considerations rule out a full-scale adoption
of LaTeX for me, but maybe the suggestions of different LaTeX environments will
be useful for others. Perhaps Lyx (George Reeke's suggestion) might be
sufficiently WYSIWYG to convince collaborators to install it, although Blaine
Mooers and Murpholino Peligro pointed out some potential complications with
this solution, particularly in compatibility with bibliography tools.
However, there also seem to be some interesting tools that allow you to prepare
just the equations in LaTeX and paste at least images of those equations into
Word documents. Your collaborators wouldn't be able to edit the equations
without getting the same tools, which is a downside of this option. Several
people (Jonathan Davies, Nicolas Soler, Blaine Mooers) suggested LaTeXit and
Bill Scott suggested TeX-fog. I'm going to play with LaTeXit to see how I like
that, particularly for PowerPoint where there's less of an issue with
collaboration.
Similarly, Adrian Goldman suggested that the Mac Grapher program could be used
to prepare pictures of equations.
Then there was some lateral thinking. Jens Thomas suggested that I could turn
AutoSave off and implement my own replacement from the Terminal window with the
following script:
——
#!/bin/bash
[[ $# -ne 1 ]] && echo "Usage: $0 <path_to_file>" && exit 1
while true;
do
cp $1 ${1}.bak
sleep 60
done
——
Kay Diederichs suggested installing Word for Windows on a Windows virtual
machine, though I balk at paying Microsoft for two more licences to work around
a bug in their software!
Another issue, which I didn't raise in my original post, is what happens when
your file gets to the publisher. Putting my Acta D hat on (and for all of us
as members of the IUCr), we should try to make it easier for our journals.
Also, proofreading is much easier if some poor person hasn't had to retype all
the equations. So I asked at Acta Cryst what happens when papers are submitted
in different formats. One possibility is to submit a LaTeX document for
everything, in which case the equations should be fine. For documents
submitted in Word format, Simon Westrip described their workflow as follows:
——
1) All documents (Word or OpenOffice) are processed using Word on Windows
machines
2) MathType is used to convert any equation objects in the document to Plain TeX
3) If MathType fails (which it often does with Microsofts 'docx MathML'
equations,
then my own software attempts to convert MathML-based equations objects to
Plain Tex.
4) Any remaining equations have to be typeset manually (e.g. those that are
included as
images)
So ideally, in the absence of MathType or any other plugin that can embed
equation 'objects'
in Word documents, we would prefer that the equations be prepared using Word's
built-in editor.
——
As Simon said in a followup, if other solutions become popular, they'll
accommodate them at the IUCr journals. In the meantime, I guess I'll be
learning the built-in editor.
Randy Read
> On 18 May 2015, at 09:10, Randy Read <rj...@cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Rather off-topic, but maybe someone on the list has found a way to work
> around this!
>
> There’s a problem with the Equation Editor in Office 2011 for Mac (i.e. the
> one that is based on a stripped-down version of MathType, which you get with
> Insert->Object->Microsoft Equation). You can insert an equation, re-open it
> and edit it several times, and then suddenly (and seemingly randomly) the
> equation object will be replaced by a picture showing the equation, which can
> no longer be edited. I’m writing a rather equation-heavy paper at the
> moment, and this is driving me crazy.
>
> This seems to be a known bug, which has existed from the release of Office
> 2011. Apparently it happens, unpredictably, when an AutoSave copy of the
> document is saved, so you can avoid it by turning off the AutoSave feature.
> The last time this drove me crazy, several years ago, I did try turning off
> AutoSave. For a while, I was very good about manually saving frequently, but
> I got into bad habits and eventually Word crashed after I had worked for
> several hours on a grant proposal without manually saving. So I turned
> AutoSave back on.
>
> At the moment, the least-bad solution seems to be to turn off AutoSave while
> I’m working on a document with lots of equations and then (hopefully)
> remember to turn it back on after that document is finished. But it would be
> great if someone has come up with a better cure for this problem.
>
> No doubt someone will suggest switching from Word to LaTeX, but I need to be
> able to collaborate on paper-writing, and even though I might be willing to
> invest the effort in learning LaTeX, I can’t really expect that of my
> collaborators. Most people in our field do use Microsoft Word, regardless of
> its failings. I’ve also tried using the professional version of MathType,
> but that requires your collaborators to install it as well — and I don’t
> think that cured the equation to picture problem anyway.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -----
> Randy J. Read
> Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge
> Cambridge Institute for Medical Research Tel: +44 1223 336500
> Wellcome Trust/MRC Building Fax: +44 1223 336827
> Hills Road E-mail:
> rj...@cam.ac.uk
> Cambridge CB2 0XY, U.K.
> www-structmed.cimr.cam.ac.uk
------
Randy J. Read
Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research Tel: + 44 1223 336500
Wellcome Trust/MRC Building Fax: + 44 1223 336827
Hills Road E-mail: rj...@cam.ac.uk
Cambridge CB2 0XY, U.K. www-structmed.cimr.cam.ac.uk
