Symbols and Equation Support in OneNote 2010 Tech Preview

One of the features of Equation Support with OneNote 2010 is the ability to insert specific symbols into a math zone. Strictly speaking, these symbols are just characters in the font used by equations - Cambria Math - so you can use the characters anywhere that font is supported, but in OneNote 2010 we added a gallery to the ribbon to help drill down the specific character you want. This may seem trivial to test and it some ways it was, but every so often someone overlooks the ability to change the default character selection so I thought I would go over that functionality.

If you don't have OneNote 2010, you can follow along the UI with Word 2007 if you want.

To get the Equation Tools | Design tab to open, create a math zone on the page. The easiest way is to type ALT while pressing the Equal key (ALT+=). The Design tab will pop open.

The Symbols galley is in the middle of the ribbon. The default selections are from "Basic Math." If you click the drop down arrow which is highlighted in yellow below (our hover behavior, by the way), you can see other classifications of the symbols:

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Here are the selections we added:

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There are many symbols in here, and testing them was straightforward. Simply select the given symbol from the gallery and ensure it was inserted in the equation correctly. A ribbon test was also easy. When you highlight the symbol, it draws enlarged to make it easier to see, and a tooltip pops up to tell you what the symbol is. Here's the ribbon UI for the symbol that looks like an eyeball on the Geometry gallery:

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It is the "Spherical Angle" character. Looks like an eyeball to me :)

Getting this feature of Equation support implemented was overall a relatively easy task. Well, relatively easy once the ribbon was implemented, the rich edit equation support was exposed, the gallery ported to OneNote, the design of the gallery finalized, tooltips on the ribbon were implemented, etc… There is a lot of groundwork that had to get done before this could work correctly and since I could rely on the partner teams to get their testing completed, I had a relatively simple task of working through this feature.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John