Tell me more ×
Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 0 down vote favorite

For work-related reasons I recently switched from LaTeX to Word. I heavily use the MathType equations editor (in-line; not the pop-up editor) in Office for Mac 2011 14.1.0 on Mac OSX 10.8.2 Mountain Lion.

I read online that the built-in MathType editor can apparently understand simple and even more sophisticated LaTeX commands. Here is an example of a list of commands that ought to work: http://iun.edu/~mathiho/useful/word07shortcuts.pdf

The simplest commands, however, do not work for me. That is, I cannot use the hotkeys for superscript (^), subscript (_), and fraction (/) (i.e. most commands on page 1 of the PDF above don't work). Strangely, however, many other commands from pages 2-6 work!

Is this a known bug? How can I fix this problem? Thank you!

share|improve this question
1  
Welcome to TeX.sx! How Office implements fake LaTeX macros is probably not a TeX community’s concern. Meaning: Such a question is off topic on this platform. Word only uses the macro names for the user-interface. There is not much TeX involved. By the way, the command for a fraction is \frac. / is just the division’s slash. – Qrrbrbirlbel Jan 24 at 4:07
Thanks for your comment! I don't know how Office implements TeX. But this topic should be of interest to anyone who is required to use Word but wants to leverage the capabilities of TeX within that framework. I'm not the first to wonder what the relationship between Word and TeX is. – Oliver Jan 24 at 4:24
I was able to eventually solve the problem: it did not work because I had not installed Office's VBA. (Watch out for the error message "Word could not fire event" when closing Word - this indicates that VBA is not installed!) Now, having installed VBA during a clean Office 2011 install, all hotkeys work properly. – Oliver Feb 13 at 5:01
While I know close to nothing about the technical intricacies of this problem, it sounds like you could just write up a self-answer?! – doncherry Feb 13 at 6:08

migrated from tex.stackexchange.com Jan 24 at 9:26

Know someone who can answer? Share a link to this question via email, Google+, Twitter, or Facebook.

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.