Tutorial: Equations in Pages ’09

Claudiu | 18 Iulie 2009 | 86545.71 | Tags: , , , , | Comentează 

Equations for a scientific paper is a must and since Pages (from iWork ’09 suite) don’t have built-in support for them, we must find a way for decorating our scientific ramblings with beautiful equations. Basically, there are two approaches: the MathType way and the LaTeX way. Here’s a newbie guide of the two, written by a newbie in MacOS world, after a Friday’s afternoon research.

MathType is a commercial application ($97 or $57 for academic use) and it has versions for Windows (MS Office) and Mac too. iWork’s Pages ’09 offers support for MathType 6. Installation for MathType is pretty straightforward, just download the .dmg file from manufacturer’s website and install it. We can use MathType for free for 30 days, after that the demo expires and the software must be purchased (or uninstalled). Curiously, MathType requires you close all (and it means all) running application in order to perform a complete install. After everything is done, from Pages menu, you can select to insert a MathType Equation and a window will pop-up and let you visually choose what do you want to insert. It’s easy and remind me of Equation Editor from Windows. I didn’t managed to properly uninstall MathType, simply dragging the application to the Trash will not remove Pages entry.

Since I’m not willing to pay for a decent and simple equation editor under MacOS, I also tried the LaTeX way. Here, things are a little bit more tricky, but not complicated and, and above all, it’s free, so it will worth the trouble. First, you’ll need a TeX distribution, and I’ve chosen MacTex, which can be downloaded from here. Download the latest version and install it. It will take a while, since the size of the installer is over 1GB. It’s important to have it installed first and than continue to the next steps, since all the following application will need to have a TeX distribution. Instead of using MacTeX, probably TeX Live is also a good choice, but I haven’t tried it. Next, we need and editor. LaTeXit is a small and simple application that let you insert the LaTeX syntax and displays the equation. You can freely download LaTexit from here, but it is also bundled in MacTeX. There are two type of persons, the ones who know LaTeX syntax and the ones who don’t. I don’t and for those of you who belongs in this category, we also need TeX Fog, which stands for stands for “TeX Formula Graphic user interface” (available here). It provides you with a nice panel that resembles the MathType one, where you can easily write your equaton in a LaTeX fashion, that copy the generated syntax into LaTexit, wait for the preview and then just drag the image into Pages (or Keynote). It’s not as simple and straightforward as with MathType, but it’s not difficult either, plus it’s free and it’s an open format.

Next, we’ll cover some MacOS applications for managing articles and references collections, stay tuned.