Technology
WordPad Numbering Limit
In Windows 7, WordPad has undergone many improvements even though it uses RichEdit 4.1+ for editing and display. Time and time again, the excellent Hyderabad team responsible for enhancing the Windows 7 WordPad requested very reasonable extensions to RichEdit 4.1, extensions that have been included in later versions of RichEdit. They’ve also requested features that aren’t in the latest RichEdit (7.0) which ships with Office 2010, but that’s another story. One of their many requests has to do with limiting numbered paragraphs to a maximum number of 255. Why not 1000 or 10000? The reason for the small numbering maximum is that RichEdit 4.1 doesn’t cache paragraph number offsets and calculating the offsets on the fly can require substantial execution time. Without the limit, the RichEdit team had bugs claiming that RichEdit was literally hanging. Interestingly enough, later versions of RichEdit don't have this limit. Let's see why.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
When the original OneNote was created in the Office 2003 time frame, it used RichEdit 5.0 and needed some special Page/Table Services (PTS) features. PTS is a component library complementing LineServices. PTS is responsible for laying out pages and tables, whereas LineServices is responsible for laying out individual lines. PTS requires “names” for each paragraph (soft or hard), so Sasha Gil of the RichEdit team added special “NMP” runs for the purpose. Fortuitously, this run infrastructure provides a convenient place to cache paragraph number offsets and allowed us to remove RichEdit’s numbering maximum of 255.
Ironically OneNote has always handled paragraph numbering itself, but nevertheless RichEdit numbering has benefitted by OneNote’s need for PTS. Bidirectional (BiDi) layout involving Hebrew and/or Arabic text and math processing also benefit since the NMP runs greatly speed up paragraph boundary navigation. In fact RichEdit 6.0 and later versions automatically enable NMP runs whenever numbered paragraphs, BiDi and/or math are present in a document even if PTS itself isn’t enabled.
A footnote to this saga is some sage advice given to me by Eliyezer Kohen, the leader of the original teams that developed Microsoft’s TrueType implementation, the OpenType specification, LineServices, and PTS. I was designing and implementing RichEdit’s binary format for, you guessed it, the first version of OneNote (OneNote 2010 has switched to a different format). Eliyezer strongly recommended that RichEdit’s binary format tag paragraph boundaries explicitly, even though RichEdit didn’t formally need such tagging. He was absolutely right. From both structural and performance standpoints, knowledge of paragraph boundaries is very valuable in text editing and display.
Adult movies
New drafts of MathML 3.0 and the MathML for CSS profile
Entering Math via the Linear Format
Math Handwriting Recognition
The next version of Windows, Windows 7, includes a cool applet called the Math Input Panel. This applet lets you enter mathematical text using a pen or a mouse. It recognizes what you enter and displays the result using a special private version of RichEdit 6. It also lets you copy the results to Word, Mathematica, or any other application that reads Presentation MathML.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Many people may find that writing equations by hand with this applet is the easiest and fastest way to enter them into a computer. Since I’ve made similar claims for linear format entry in Word 2007, we decided to have a race. I chose nine equations from theoretical physics and we started entering. The person entering via hand writing beat me by a nose, but had two errors, whereas I had none. But really we both won, since we demonstrated that we could enter equations into Word 2007 remarkably fast.
I’ll continue to use the linear format for writing my technical papers, since I know it so well (I’ve been using it in one form or another for 25 years). In fact, see the following blog post for a video demonstration. But I heartily recommend installing the Release Candidate for Windows 7 and checking out the Math Input Panel. You’ll probably also love Windows 7!Empty Math Zone Place Holders
You type Alt+= or click the Insert ribbon Equation button, and presto! You’ve inserted an empty math zone place holder that states “Type equation here.” in the language you’re using. Then you type a^2+b^2<space> and you see a2+b2, except in better typography. The empty math zone place holder seems simple and intuitive, but behind the scenes a fair amount of software is handling a variety of situations that probably don’t come to mind when you do the things above.
For example, if you cursor away from the math zone, either by using the arrow keys or the mouse, the empty math zone place holder remains; it’s just not selected anymore. If you save the file and reopen it, you’ll see the place holder just where you inserted it. If you select the place holder, possibly with text surrounding it, and copy paste it somewhere else in the document, you’ll see it pasted at the target location.
Furthermore if you return to the place holder, either using the arrow keys or the mouse, the place holder will automatically be reselected. So if you then type something, what you type replaces the place holder. Yet another characteristic: if you type Backspace in a math zone until the last character is deleted, the empty math zone place holder reappears and is selected. Naturally if you type Backspace yet one more time, the place holder is deleted, just as it is if you type the Delete key.
Now what if you type Alt+= immediately before or after an unselected empty math zone place holder? You guessed it! Instead of inserting a new place holder, the current one is reselected. There are other variations that Word 2007 doesn’t get quite right: if you select a bunch of text including one or more empty math zone place holders and then type Alt+=, you’d probably expect the included empty math zone place holders to be deleted, since they’re inside a math zone and nested math zones aren’t permitted. But Word 2007 doesn’t catch this relatively unlikely scenario (it doesn’t crash either, thank goodness!)
The bottom line is that the seemingly simple idea of having a place holder for inserting some math isn’t as straightforward as you might expect.
What do to in the future? The empty math zone place holder is clearly a useful math user interface feature, even if it is tricky to implement correctly. In addition, particularly for educational purposes, one might like to have other place holders within nonempty math zones to ask the user to type, for example, the numerator of a fraction or the integrand of an integral. Such place holders also could be copied and saved to file and reselected by moving the insertion point into them.
MathDox Editor
At the TU/e we have started the development of an online Math Editor.We report on a new
Web-based tool under development at the TU/e, called MathDox Editor, for the interactive entering
and editing of semantically rich mathematical documents and expressions.
The (envisoned) features of the MathDox editor are:
- Rich mathematical document structure (theorem, lemma, proof etc).
- Inline editing of mathematical formulas;
- Semantic presentation of mathematics in OpenMath;
- Basic output format MathDox (an extension of DocBook with OpenMath);
MathDox Editor
At the TU/e we have started the development of an online Math Editor.We report on a new
Web-based tool under development at the TU/e, called MathDox Editor, for the interactive entering
and editing of semantically rich mathematical documents and expressions.
The (envisoned) features of the MathDox editor are:
- Rich mathematical document structure (theorem, lemma, proof etc).
- Inline editing of mathematical formulas;
- Semantic presentation of mathematics in OpenMath;
- Basic output format MathDox (an extension of DocBook with OpenMath);
