Latex in MS Word

Jonny_trigonometry

I was wondering how you install a latex plugin into MS Word...

franznietzsche

You don't use LaTeX in MS Word. LaTeX is a markup language used by the latex program which produces a .dvi file from latex source files. LaTeX is not just for equations, its for the entire documents. Almost all major journal publications use LaTeX and not word processors (in physics anyway). MS Word has its own equation editor, but its not part of the default installation.

Jonny_trigonometry

ahh, ok thanks.

Pengwuino

Microsoft Word has an "Equation Editor" that basically does formulas and equations.

franznietzsche

On a side note, this has come up a couple times in a couple subforums. maybe its time we put a note in the sticky regarding the sites LaTeX capabilities about this, since most people with Windows PCs are not familiar with LaTeX beyond this site.

matthyaouw

You could always write out the latex here, preview post, copy/paste.

franznietzsche

What purpose would that serve?

matthyaouw

It would get it into MS word?

franznietzsche

Oh, ok I understand now. You mean copy and paste the image file, not the LaTeX code. Gotcha. Yeah, that should work. Didn't think of that.

Jonny_trigonometry

ya, thats what i've been doing, but I have to put it through photoshop to crop it down, and change the contrast so that the background is white instead of grey. After I get the equation rendered, I have to then go back and delete the post that I made to render it (because at least for me, pf doesn't render the equations in a preview). Doing this just takes too much time to be practical; also, it uses/abuses pf's resources. I'd rather just get a plugin.

moose

umm, you can just copy and paste directly. You don't need to take a screenshot.

franznietzsche

Except there is no such plugin. MS Word has its own equation editor, though its much less friendly than LaTeX (actually the entire word processor is).

What are you writing up? Depending on what you're doing, it may be worthwhile to start learning how to use LaTeX properly to produce whole documents. You can get MikTex for Windows for free.

robphy

Someone at PF pointed to
http://www.sciencesoft.at/index.jsp?...x&js=0&lang=en and
http://hausheer.osola.com/latex2png

samoth1

I prefer MathType for typing up papers and what have you. There's a free 'MT Lite' version, and the original program runs about the same as MatLab and Mathmatica, ~ $100.

franznietzsche

LaTeX is free, and professional.

MathType is just a souped up edition of the MS Word Equation editor is it not? Personally, I find the MS Word Equation editor (and word processors in general really) grossly inferior to LaTeX. Both in terms of ease of use and quality of the documents produced. The only time I use a word processor any more is when I have a retarded humanities teacher that demands Times New Roman, or worse, .doc files. Which is not that often anymore.

On a side note: I love MatLab. Lovely thing to have when I need to calculate the percent ionization of hydrogen and helium throughout the sun or some such. Though it runs calculations much more slowly than my homebrewed Fortran codes, its takes much less planning. I use it for all my lightweight numeric work.

Jonny_trigonometry

All I've used is Mathematica. I haven't been able to figure out matlab on my own yet. Is there a online tutorial you would recommend for matlab?

franznietzsche

If you know C its very easy to start writing simple numerical scripts, as matlab's language is very similar to C (actually its prolly closer to perl. My matlab files are simple enough I could prolly just take them and run them directly in perl, changing only the loop statements). I've done C and C++ programming in the past (though I much prefer Fortran for numerical work and Perl for everything else) so I don't know of any tutorials. The help files are decent, not fantastic, but decent. Just try Googling around, I'm sure there is something on the 'net.