My standard equation editor for some years has been the Equation Editor that comes with older versions of MS Office. After making the equation, I usually yank it out into whatever application I’m actually using. However, the equation editor in MS Word 2011 is broken after the Yosemite update. Apparently there are problems with links to Visual Basic. I tried to fix this problem on my machine with the help of the internet, but couldn’t get any further than ‘reinstall Office’. Fair enough but I never really felt comfortable with this crummy workflow anyway, so I looked for an alternative.
Because -despite Apple’s despicable file format changes that have nobbled Sente– I use Pages for documents that are mine and mine only, and Pages doesn’t do equations, I found a small program called LaTexIt that allows equations to be entered in LaTex (download link). Fantastic work from Pierre-Yves Chatelier.
The best part is that you don’t have to know any LaTex (I don’t) because there are palettes (right). You get the equation in any of the most useful image or vector forms (e.g. pdf) in the end. The program seems to be actively developed and has a first-class read-me – full of information. The only potential problem that I can see is that you need to install LaTex and that might be hard (somehow I had it already so have no idea). Here’s my first one:
During my search I also found that OpenOffice now has several Solver plugins for non-linear equations in the Calc program (scroll to the bottom). Equations can be written in the ‘Math’ module. It might be time to give OpenOffice another try – there’s now very little that MS Office can do that OOO can’t.
Serious Piffle 