
LaTeX Math in MS Office - ygra
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2017/07/30/latex-math-in-office/
======
JohnHammersley
This is great to see, although it sounds like it's still somewhat in beta. Be
interesting to find out if they support packages such as amsmath, either now
or in the future.

As a shameless plug, for anyone wanting to use LaTeX without having to install
everything locally, the online compilers Overleaf [1] and ShareLaTeX [2] are
pretty handy. I'm one of the founders of Overleaf, and we're excited to now be
working together with the ShareLaTeX team [3]. Feedback always appreciated :)

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com/](https://www.overleaf.com/)

[2] [https://www.sharelatex.com/](https://www.sharelatex.com/)

[3] [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-
sharelatex-i...](https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-
is-joining-overleaf)

~~~
pletnes
Happy sharelatex user here. I'd say one of the essential advantages is rock
solid simultaneous editing. I converted a couple of word users and they were
instantly hooked. On a tight deadline, no less! Saved our ass in the end - the
slowness of working serially in word would have meant missing the deadline.

~~~
danieldk
I highly prefer LaTeX (and Markdown via pandoc) for writing, but Word does not
require you to work serially. If you store a document on OneDrive (or
SharePoint I guess), you can edit a document with multiple people
simultaneously. Both from Word Online and Word on your PC/Mac.

[https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-
Word...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Collaborate-on-Word-
documents-with-real-time-co-authoring-7dd3040c-3f30-4fdd-bab0-8586492a1f1d)

~~~
Nullabillity
There's a huge difference between "use this specific cloud service" and "use
anything that can diff text".

~~~
rubidium
"use this specific cloud service" that most large companies and universities
are adopting. And with a GUI that's much more familiar to non-programmers.

------
pmoriarty
I wonder if Microsoft is going to try to "embrace and extend" LaTeX as they as
they have with so many other technologies and standards over the years.

~~~
ernst_klim
They will, intentionally or not. Many think of EEE as of an evil plot, but in
reality that's just like all NIH-oriented companies work. Canonical is the
same. They take something and after that they make some in-house
"improvements" without any care of standards, because they treat every piece
of technology as their own, part of _their_ product, and voila, we have a new
non-compatible technology. It's cultural, they just can't do it in any other
way, even when they make some MIT-licensed OSS.

~~~
cjsuk
The difference is that Canonical know when their time is up. Microsoft will
steam roll everyone with marketing, blogs and noise.

------
ptspts
The example formula in the article looks ugly. It looks like Microsoft Office
doesn't support beautiful math formulas using TeX's typesetting engine and
TeX's math fonts. [https://www.mathjax.org/](https://www.mathjax.org/) can do
it on the web.

~~~
jahewson
Huh? The example formula looks great. I really can't fault it. I think maybe
you just don't like the font, Cambria Math.

~~~
adrianratnapala
I don't particularly like the font, although I only really object to the
theta.

There are other nitpicks: The pi looks too italic to me, though I can't really
say its wrong (whatever "wrong" means). The spacing between the integral sign
and the integrand is too big -- but this is a common problem even in real
LaTex.

Overall, it looks decent but just not as nice as the maths that TeX has been
pumping out for decades now.

~~~
pmiller2
As long as we're nitpicking, the d in front of the theta shouldn't really be
italicizes, anyway. I'd class that more as an input error than an output
error, though.

~~~
jhanschoo
Actually, many mathematics authors use an italic d while the upright d
convention is standard in physics and engineering.

~~~
adrianratnapala
Is that to disambiguate it from the upright d in exterior calculus?

That would be funny, as that symbol was chosen specifically to overload with
the traditional little-d notation from Leibniz.

------
Regist
WSL and now Tex. Some real embracing happening as of late.

~~~
mtl_usr
The MacBook Air being ridiculously noncompetitive and the recent hike in price
for the MacBook and the MacBook Pro totally changed the college laptop market.

For the last 10 years+ almost everyone in CS had a Mac from the start or
bought one along the way. I'm starting to think this trend will end due to the
price hike.

That means that a bunch of new students will use WSL instead of doing their
Linux based homework using MacOS *NIX utilities. Adding native LaTeX support
in word further makes the platform very attractive for that kind of
demographic.

When looking at SV, I see most startups and devs working with Macs. This makes
sense as it was probably on Macs that the earliest version of their product
was developed. Often the Mac version is the first class version of the app and
the windows port often an afterthought. Just look at Node.js that was
originally a Mac/Linux exclusive. I think Microsoft want to change that.

------
tuanx5
This was added to Pages earlier this year too.[0] I wonder what prompted these
features, other than the fact that clicking around to enter equations is a
memorable pain.

[0] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207569](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT207569)

~~~
Osmium
though not Keynote (yet?)

Mac's in-built but largely unknown Grapher app has the best equation editor
I've used. Super easier to use, automatic sub/superscripting, and you can
right-click to copy as LaTeX.

Makes me sad that Grapher seems to be abandoned -- Apple invests a lot in pro
apps, and consumer apps like Garageband. Where's the love for science/math?
Surely the market is as large as the market for, say, musicians? There are a
lot of engineers/scientists out there.

~~~
Someone
As a workaround, you _can_ copy and paste equations between Pages and Keynote.
It even round trips in the sense that you can edit an equation that was copy-
pasted to Keynote by copying it back to Pages.

~~~
Osmium
This is really useful, thank you!

As much as I love Keynote it'd be sooo useful to have native equation support,
and native code syntax highlighting (can't they port this from XCode?)

------
pxc
LibreOffice has had this for some time:

[http://roland65.free.fr/texmaths/](http://roland65.free.fr/texmaths/)

I do most of my serious typesetting in LyX, so I haven't done much with
TeXMaths, but I've used it a little bit. It seems pretty nice: you can have a
custom preamble and custom packages (although you'll probably have to link the
.sty files you need into the directory where the document lives).

------
boromi
I have been waiting so long for this. For PPT it's unfortunately still a bit
annoying to enable latex, but I believe MSFT is actively working to fix this.

------
ptspts
Is Microsoft Word able to break the line automatically in a long sum (if
entered as a math formula), e.g. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 +
12 + 13 + 14 + 15 + 16 + 17 + 18 + 19 + 20? Is Microsoft Word able to stretch
the spaces around the + sign in the math formula to better suit the justified
alignment of the paragraph? TeX has been able to do these since the late
1970s.

~~~
lottin
Most importantly, does Microsoft Word support TeX macros? Because I'm not
going to type a long sequence of commands every time I want a mathematical
symbol in bold face.

~~~
ygra
There is auto-correct as an alternative to parameterless macros, otherwise no,
as far as I know, although the last version I've used was 2010.

------
toyonut
Microsoft must be on a LaTex kick at the moment. I just noticed there is a
Microsoft language plugin for LaTex for VS Code.
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-
vscod...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.latex)

~~~
cmarschner
"Microsoft" is a collection of 120000 individuals, many of which have used
LaTeX for many years themselves (or still are).

~~~
ygra
Heck, one of them is the La of LaTeX ;-)

------
askvictor
Math input is the sole reason my school has to keep using Microsoft products.
I'm really surprised Google has neglected this so long; while in the meantime
MS has caught up in a lot of features (indeed, leapfrogged in some), and we
look to shifting back to MS to maintain a unified platform.

------
saagarjha
Is this Windows-only? I'm not seeing it on macOS.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
It says it'll be up next month.

------
fibo
Finally! Good job MicroSoft.

------
mathperson
if one could use LaTex in office it would beg the question why not just use
Latex instead..

------
konschubert
Dear Windows, while you're at it, could you please make home folder encryption
available in Windows Home? Because limiting that to Pro is really mean.

