MathType in InDesign for Mac?

Viewing 5 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • #109681
      Steve Straus
      Member

      After struggling with MathType for many years, I have again dipped my InDesign toe into their waters. This add-on always seems promising, but the end results have always been less than professional. Even using the newest version, on a Mac, getting the equations into InDesign for a large scale book is nothing but problematic:

      1. Anybody ever figured out why the figures won’t import at exactly 100%? Even using scripts to convert them all to 100% proves unsatisfactory as baseline shifts will then be off.
      2. No matter what I do with the settings, the files always remain 4-color. In a 2-color book, this will not rip correctly as the CMY plates contain info needed to make a solid black.
      3. Even when I convert these CMYK EPS files to grayscale, the newly saved EPS file is now a different size (?) than the original, thus it has to be manually shifted. When imported directly into ID, the files come in as a special EPS file (a special combo of EPS and WMF). These files are not your typical EPS file, thus saving as a standard AI EPS file affects the file. Exporting all the figures via MathType won’t work as they would then all need to be manually imported back into the ID file — for a 400 page Math book, that won’t work.
      4. My newest nightmare is that when creating printer PDFs from files that contain MathType EPS files, the equations get outlined in the rip. When opened in AI, all the equations are outlined which tends to make them print darker. This outlining occurs using both OTF and Postscript fonts.

      Any MathType gurus out there? This all might be a Mac vs PC issue but I don’t know. Maybe MathType just isn’t the way to go as I’m open to suggestions from people with positive experiences with other add-ons. With a 400 page math book just around the corner, I need to get this figured out quickly! Thanks for the help!!!

    • #109826
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Whenever someone needs math in InDesign, I point them to movemen MathTools: https://movemen.com
      It is so much nicer doing math natively inside InDesign instead of trying to place lots of images.

    • #109831

      Just a personal comment from a guy who played with some Maths equations during years:
      Make cookbooks! It will be really easier!

      Best,
      Michel, for FRIdNGE

    • #109960
      Peter Kahrel
      Participant

      I second David’s comment: forget MathType, go for movemen’s MathTools. MathTools’s equations are plain text. It comes with various predefined character styles so that various parts of equations can be coloured in different ways. You can enter equations in InDesign, and you can translate MathType EPSs to MathTools equations. MathTools supports scripting. And MathTools equations export well to PDF, Epub, and HTML.

      Peter

    • #110382
      Qing Youguo
      Participant

      Hi all,

      If you are doing math inside InDesign For Mac, you can try InTeXLaTeX. Install MacTeX2018 & InTeXLaTeX, and run InTeXLaTeX_3.0.jsx, just doing LaTeX math inside InDesign if you learn a liitle about LaTeX. Sorry it’s only for chinese version, English version is not available yet.

      https://github.com/cooldtp/InTeXLaTeX

    • #111268

      Hopefully it is OK to add on on to this thread since it is related: my team has been using movemen’s MathTools plugin for InDesign occasionally but there is bit of learning curve. Does anyone know of any good tutorials or guides that would help users get started? Thanks.

Viewing 5 reply threads
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
>