Design Science News

MathType and WIRIS Join Forces

Bruce Virga — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 23:59:14 +0000

Maths for More, makers of WIRIS, today announced that they acquired Design Science, makers of MathType.

MathType is the leading mathematical equation editor for Microsoft Office on Windows and Mac, and WIRIS Editor is the leading equation editor for web-based platforms including LMS, CMS and assessment platforms.

The acquisition allows the combined company to begin offering a single equation editor product for all platforms on the desktop, online, tablets and mobile devices. "We will soon announce a new 'MathType Everywhere' that provides our users with universal equation editing on all platforms, and works with Microsoft Office Online, Windows and Mac, and Google Docs," said Ramon Eixarch, Maths for More's CEO. "Our products and technologies complement each other. By combining our teams we will now be able to offer education, scientific and publishing communities newer products at a fast pace," said Bruce Virga, Design Science's CEO.

WIRIS recently introduced handwriting input for math and chemistry notation. WIRIS Quizzes enhances assessment products and Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, Schoology, etc., offering automated grading, randomizing, handwriting and more.

PRESS RELEASE >>

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Discover the new math support in DITA 1.3, at CMS/ DITA North America in San Diego, California, April 24-26

Bob Mathews — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:49:42 +0000

We at Design Science are excited about the 2 new math domains in DITA 1.3. We'll have a booth in the exhibit hall, and will be on hand to talk with you about best practices for your publishing workflow, to answer your questions, and to show you the available tools for authoring, display and accessibility of MathML. If you're not able to make the conference, feel free to contact us directly at any time.

We hope to see you in California!

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MathFlow

MathML

MathFlow 2.1 Now Available

Bob Mathews — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:09:48 +0000

We at Design Science are happy to announce that MathFlow 2.1 is now available! This update supports the newest versions of oXygen, XMetaL and Arbortext. Please contact Premium Support when you are ready to upgrade, evaluate, or if you have any questions: premiumsupport@dessci.com

MathFlow is our family of products providing editing, display, and accessibility of mathematical notation for websites, applications, and services. MathFlow components are widely used in education, publishing, and enterprise solutions, as well as commercial products.

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MathFlow

MathFlow 2.1 Beta Now Available

Bob Mathews — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 23:18:17 +0000

We have released a beta version of MathFlow 2.1. It's available now for anyone using Arbortext Editor 6 or 7, or XMetaL Author 10 or 11. To download, go to MathFlow Beta Downloads. There's also a new beta version that works with oXygen. If you're using oXygen and are interested in testing or evaluating MathFlow, please let us know.

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MathFlow

Accessible Math Takes Another Step Forward

Neil Soiffer — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 20:34:01 +0000

Wikipedia recently changed its default so that not only does most math look better, but is also accessible by default. It used to be that by default, Wikipedia delivered math as PNG images. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

With PNGs, not only does the math not look very nice (wrong size and blurry), it isn’t accessible.

For the last few years, you could log into Wikipedia, and change the math to use MathML with SVG or PNG fallback. Now that is the default so that the math looks good and it is accessible because MathML is in the page. Here is what the page now looks like by default:

When reading this page with NVDA+MathPlayer, the first big equation will read as “the fraction with numerator a plus b and denominator a, equals, a over b, is defined to be, phi.”

There are tens of thousands of pages on Wikipedia with accessible math in them. If you already have NVDA, all you need is MathPlayer, which you can download for free from the MathPlayer portion of the Design Science website. There’s nothing else you need to do; now math “just works” for Wikipedia pages (mostly*).

If English isn’t your preferred language, Wikipedia has lots of pages in other languages with math in them and MathPlayer supports 14 of those languages: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, and Swedish.

*Because images looked so bad, Wikipedia made it possible to author math as a combination of HTML tags (e.g., <sub> and <sup>) and text. This was harder to do, but for short inline equations wasn’t horrible and the display looked better, so some authors did that. That math isn’t accessible yet, but often it is very simple and is not too hard to understand.

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Discover the new math support in DITA 1.3, at CMS/ DITA North America in Reston, Virginia, April 4-6

Bob Mathews — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 21:02:40 +0000

We hope to see you in Virginia!

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MathType now works with Office 2016 for Windows, Mac Office 2016 soon...

Bruce Virga — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 18:21:14 +0000

If you are using Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows, or if you have been waiting to upgrade Office until MathType was compatible, we're happy to announce there is a new update to MathType 6.9 that is compatible. If you own MathType 6.9 for Windows, download the free update. If your copy of MathType is older than version 6.9, you can purchase the upgrade from our website. If you are using Office 2016 for Windows, you do actually need the upgrade to MathType 6.9, but there is plenty of new functionality -- check out our MathType page for all the details.

What's the story with MathType and Mac Office 2016?

Some of you have been asking about MathType's compatibility with the recently released Mac Office 2016. Microsoft decided to make Mac Office 2016 compatible with Apple's Mac App Store which imposes security restrictions that affect communication between applications, preventing MathType from working with Mac Office 2016 applications such as Word and PowerPoint. Our engineers are working with Microsoft engineers on a solution but it will take some time before it will be available. We will keep you informed as we get closer to release. In the meantime, MathType 6.7 for Mac still works great with Office 2011 for Mac, Apple Pages and 800+ other applications of websites.

Thank you for your patience while this is being worked on. And thank you for continuing to use MathType.

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MathPlayer 4 public beta 2 now available

Bruce Virga — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 00:05:07 +0000

We just announced the release of the MathPlayer 4 public beta 2.

This new version installs a Ribbon into Microsoft Word and PowerPoint so that one can listen to math and navigate within equations in their documents and presentations. This feature is useful when creating accessible math and science material with MathType equations, in that one can check that the math is played back as intended. It also fills a gap for those using a screen reader that lacks math support; now one can switch to MathPlayer to read the math and back to the screen reader. MathPlayer does work with the NVDA screen reader to speak and Braille math in Microsoft Word & PowerPoint, Internet Explorer and Firefox. We expect to announce MathPlayer support with other AT software products in the coming months.

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MathPlayer

Learn about MathML at Lavacon

Lary Stucker — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 15:40:27 +0000

Design Science will be exhibiting and presenting at the LavaCon Conference in New Orleans October 18-21. If you want to learn the proper way to implement math with your content, this is a great opportunity to meet with the experts.

Plan to see Design Science's Aaron Guigar present the session Making the Most of the New Math Domains in DITA 1.3, on October 20th at 9:15am. In this session we will talk about what MathML is and the advantages of using it, its role in DITA 1.3, and the available tools for authoring, display and accessibility of MathML. If you cannot make the conference, there will be video of the presentation on the LavaCon website after the conference.

If you or any of your colleagues back at the office are working with any math content at all, stop by the exhibit area to find out about MathFlow. We would be happy to answer your specific questions and try to help with your project.

We hope to see you in New Orleans!

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eWebEditor integrates MathFlow

Aaron Guigar — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 21:27:46 +0000

Design Science has partnered with eWebSoft, the makers of eWebEditor. eWebEditor is a Chinese WYSIWYG HTML editor that can be added to web-based tools. Developers who choose eWebEditor will give their users a configurable HTML editor with the ability to author equations using MathFlow.

eWebSoft's clients include online assessment systems and learning management systems that need to properly edit mathematical content in lessons and tests. The users of this software are familiar with copying equations from Design Science's MathType software, but this integration with MathFlow will make the addition of math to websites a more seamless experience.

Would you like to give it a try? You can demo MathFlow with the eWebEditor at http://www.ewebeditor.net/math/

If you would like to learn more about MathFlow, please visit: http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathflow/

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