Thursday, November 20, 2008

Writing mathematical equations in OpenOffice

I was writing a report which contained some quite intensive mathematical equations. Naturally, my first options would have been the good old LaTeX. But this time my team-mates decided to go with OpenOffice, as they initially thought it would take less time (because of whatever reasons - GUI etc.). Now here I am, writing a part of a report that is filled with some pretty tough-to-write-in-tex equations, and trying to write it in OpenOffice. After a little Googling, I figured that using Lyx to convert my part of the document to OO format would not be easy.

Just for sake of it, I visited the OpenOffice extensions website and searched for latex. Found OOoLatex !!

After downloading from sf.net, installation was simple. In OpenOffice word:

tools -> Extension manager
choose add and add the downloaded file
(version 4.0 beta2 at the time of writing).
and restart ooword.

A new toolbar was added.

Since I am working on Linux, I already have latex and ghostscript installed, so I can freely use the 'Equation' mode which makes a png of the equation and saves the LaTeX in the image properties. Although not as easy as plain LaTeX, it certainly saved me from the pain of inserting all the weird Greek symbols and dealing with subscripts and superscripts, with summations and big matrices :D

Nice utility (or better put - bunch of macros) to keep!

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