When mathmagic plugin installed, you can simply double click on an equation to re-edit it. this would be the main benifit of MathMagic. Other strengths include automatic baseline alignment when inserted as an inline equation in a text box; you can copy & paste EPS equation within or across your InDesign documents; all equations can be extracted from InDesign document as external EPS files or converted to other formats such as MathML if your clients want.
And if you have to reedit an equation, you need a full round trip, which takes more time than MathMagic. But under $100, you get a solution. Or, you can use MathMagic Personal Edition ($69) as MathMagic offers more feature and better equation quality(personal preference) than MathType in general. MathMagic Personal application does not come with indesign plugin. So just like MathType, you can write your equation and save it as EPS or PDF, then manually place it from Indesign. MathMagic personal edition is a bit cheaper than MathType. MathMagic personal edition comes with most of MathMagic Pro features but color EPS is not supported. So if you have to use color in your equation, you will have to use MathType or MathMagic Pro.
Mathmagic Pro Edition For Indesign For Mac
If you use MathMagic Pro for InDesign layout, your front-end equation data entry team can use MathMagic Personal edition for a better workflow although Mathmagic Pro can read most MathType EPS files as well. (Mathmagic could not convert some MathType symbols corrctly)
For some time we have made equations as a link. That is normal thing, but we have seen that for some reason equations were not saved good enough on the server and as a result, they were deleted after a while. Really irritating. So therefore, we embed the equations now, and seems to work better. We do not lose them now. Just in case, we make a extra copy of the indesign document.
For Mathtype, we use scripts to place and positioning them in indesign. We get word documents with Mathtype equations (mostly 600 or more in a chapter). So automation is very important. There are some problems with making postscript from indesign documents containing Mathtype equations, so we export to pdf directly. Then we make a print. Another problem is the saving of several symbols. They do appear in Mathtype, but not in Indesign or so. The only solution is to export to pdf. If someone has a solution for it, please let me know.
Not sure if ours were the same problem but we had some issues in saving mathmagic EPS files externally when the InDesign document name or its path had some European characters. This works better now with thier newer updated plugin.
And we've also asked mathmagic company to support both options(saving externally and linking, and embeding) so we can save the equatoin eps externally first and then embed it so that we can have two copies at the same time. They promised to support this last year but no progress until now.
A bit late, but thanks for the post. But we use the macversion of Mathtype. And that is really problem. Maybe it is better to make a pc only workflow for mathtype and forget about the mac platform. Mathtype for mac is a real problem. I am not so concerned about the the fact that exporting to pdf is the only way to get an output from indesign, but the disappearing of particular characters when placing the equations in indesign. 2ff7e9595c
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