Math typesetting can be a drag, but you can make short work of it with movemen MathTools and some tricky InDesign scripts!
In this three-minute Lightning Session from the 2019 Typefi User Conference, Typefi Senior Solutions Consultant Eric Damitz demonstrates some of the math typesetting scripts that are available to Typefi customers.
{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Typesetting Math with Interactive Scripts","description":"Typesetting Math with Interactive Scripts","thumbnailUrl":"http://originp3.s3.amazonaws.com/thumbnails/35257/3831714/3831714_thumbnail.png","uploadDate":"2019-07-22T00:57:12.000-04:00","transcript":"- [Eric Damitz] (sighs) Yes, math typesetting. How many of you do math typesetting? It's great right, a lot of fun? What I'm going to show you is a way that you can set up your template if you're using MathML in your workflow or a MathType EPS file, if you're using Typefi, and if you're using movemen MathTools, the InDesign plug-in, to do the math layout. I have some MathML over here, I'm going to copy it. This is a template I am working in here now. And I'm going to paste it. Now normally, if you're setting up your math styles in the template building process you would run a job, see what happened, go into your template, twiddle with things, upload it, run the job again, and so on until you got things looking the way you like them. We have a few scripts that our friend Peter Kahrel has created. These are interactive math scripts. They're the same ones that run on the server but they can be used interactively on my desktop here to create the math out of the MathML on the fly. And this works with MathTools Enterprise Edition, that's very important. Now, what just happened here? I got myself a nice little stack of equations. The fractions are too tiny. They should be bigger. These are display equations. Because of the way my MathML was set up that's what I ended up getting. So, I can go ahead and make a little change here. When you have MathTools you have a Math menu up here and you also have a palette of Math Styles. And if I select the fraction I can see which style MathTools assigned to that. So there's a little trick you can do here. If you tell it to be just slightly larger than 100%-- the numbers in the numerator and the denominator. And hey, say OK, well, nothing happens because I have to tell it to please recompose all the MathZones. It's made my math bigger. Which is what I want, but it's still sitting on top of each other, which is not what I want. So we have another script that Peter created for us called Align Equations. 'Cause the point of this is I want them all to align on the equal sign. So if I run this script interactively, of course it's also a server script. Uh oh, this is too big. There we go. You can see that it will align and centre that stack of equations. So if we have our MathML set up correctly we can get a result like this, in an automatic fashion using these scripts, and if you want to set up your template you can do font changes, you can do all kinds of changes to all these different Math Styles. You can do all of that locally, on your computer, without running jobs through Typefi to get your setup done with these interactive scripts. So, that is a little bit about math and interactive scripts, thank you. "}
Eric Damitz
Senior Solutions Consultant | Typefi
As a Senior Solutions Consultant, Eric works with customers to determine the best way to use Typefi for their particular needs, and then implements their solution. He started in publishing over 20 years ago as a TeX typesetter at a small development house, where he learned such valuable skills as opaquing film, making Dylux proofs, and pasting up forms with hot wax. He also learned desktop publishing, which was somewhat more useful. He moved to a large educational publishing company and spent 17 years as a production manager working with his colleagues to re-invent how publishing works—several times.
Eric’s particular skillset focuses on publishing automation, workflow improvement, and single-source publishing for both digital and print. He has a degree in Rhetoric (writing, not arguing) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.