TextEdit Question

[chemistry_geek]

I cannot seem to get the Symbol font to work in TextEdit. Why? This is a bummer. I'm writing my thesis and I need scientific symbols in my document.

[lethe]

go to the international preference pane in system preferences, and choose the keyboard menu tab. then check the box next to symbol. when you want to use it, choose symbol from the menu bar with the flag that will appear when you do this.

incidentally, for scientific papers, i find nothing looks better than LaTeX.

[chemistry_geek]

Where do I get LaTex? Is it Free, as in Beer?

[lethe]

yeah, its free of cost and free of restriction (being GPL).

you can get it from apples website here

this software package won apples award for best open source OSX port, by the way.

incidentally, it has a slight learning curve. so if your needs are very modest, just insert your greek fonts in textedit. but if you need to show any kind of mathematical equations, this is your tool. and it makes greek math symbols look like greek math symbols instead of text from greece. it knows all about how to do superscripts intelligently, and integral signs and anything you would want to do. LaTeX is a markup language, very similar to html, except that it also has macros. it is about the same difficulty to learn as html, in other words, not very difficult, but more so than textedit s font window.

in my schools math and physics department, it is the lingua franca for scientific documents. my profs thesis was done in LaTeX, as i assume mine will be. i don t know how much it is used in chemistry, but its at least worth looking into, and it is free (as in beer, haha)

here is the central website for all things tex:
http://www.tug.org/

[JetwingX]

it comes with an equation editor REALLY handy for Algebra anr Square roots and the such

[lethe]

word processors with equation editors (appleworks, MS office, koffice, and others all have them), are OK if all you want to do is print it out and have it on paper (although LaTeX documents look a lot better than any equation editor i have used, but that s just my opinion)

the problem with using equation editor, is that you can t email the file to anyone, unless they are also running your program. you can t publish it on a website, and as soon as a new release of your office suite comes out, your files compatibility becomes questionable.

there is another open standard for writing mathematical formulae, specifically designed for the web. it is called MathML, and it is brand new. it is an extension of XML, and a lot of new browsers are supporting it (mozilla, omniweb, IE, on my mac support it at least to some extent). it is new, and i haven t used it yet, so i m not going to recommend it, because i don t know how well it works. mathML can be translated into LaTeX and LaTeX into MathML, so a transition will be easy. but my department still uses LaTeX.

here is the link for MathML
http://www.w3c.org/Math/

i really can t discourage you stringly enough from using a word processor equation editor. its nice to have a WYSIWYG interface, if that s what you re used to, but in an academic environment, the goal should be sharing ideas, and with computers, you should always use interoperable formats.

[lethe]

i ve just been poking around in TeXShop, and i noticed that you can open a panel with a whole bunch of buttons for using LaTeX tags. this would make it considerably easier for someone to start working in LaTeX without any previous knowledge. still not as simple as a WYSIWYG equation editor. it s exactly like BBEdit: it is a text editor, but it lets you hit buttons that give you tags, that you can then tweak by hand. full greek alphabet, all your integral signs and vectors and all kinds of that stuff.

i am going to post a little paper i wrote as an ugrad, so you can see what it looks like. the file is a pdf.gz, you will have to rename it, since macosx.com doesn t let you attach pdfs. i named it with a .txt, so download it, and rename it to neut.pdf.gz. then unzip it and view it with your favorite pdf viewer.

[lethe]

one of the nice things LaTeX can do is easily fit equations in line with your text. it is smart: if you put an equation in the text, it will make the fractions and integrals and stuff fit on one line, but if you designate it an important equation, the fractions get two lines, and the integral signs stretch their feet out.

it will automatically number your equations, and you can reference them by name in your text, so that if you later insert another equation at the beginning, all the numbers will get bumped by one, and your reference in the text will also get bumped up one.

it is really a wonderful way to write mathematical and scientific documents.

chemistry_geek, if you are realy busy right now with your thesis, you might not be interested in playing around with a new technology, but it s good to know you have that option in the future