Murray Sargent: Math in Office

I'm a software development engineer in Microsoft Office and have been working mostly on the RichEdit editor since 1994. In this blog I focus on mathematics in Office along with some posts on RichEdit and the early Windows days

Hot Keys and altGr

The earlier post, RichEdit Hot Keys, lists all built-in RichEdit hot keys. In particular, it lists a...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 04/20/2015

RichEdit Colors

Occasionally people ask how foreground (text) and background colors work in RichEdit. This post...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 03/27/2015

Math Language Tag

To guide proofing tools to use the correct dictionaries and autocorrect lists as well as to display...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 02/14/2015

Ruby Text Objects

Chinese characters are used to represent syllables and words in a number of East Asian languages. In...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 12/27/2014

Math Symbol Hierarchy

The Unicode Standard 7.0 has 2311 math symbols not including the ASCII letters and the standard...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 11/26/2014

Smart Lighting

This post involves an old passion of mine, computerizing homes. First some background. I spent the...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 10/21/2014

Entering Unicode Characters

As noted in the post Symbols and Emoji we have the ability to input characters in much more powerful...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 09/30/2014

Symbols and Emoji

The emoji symbols (literally picture characters) introduced by Japanese cell phone carriers have...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 08/31/2014

RichEdit Plain-Text Controls

A Unicode plain-text editor appears to have a single set of character formatting properties for the...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 07/21/2014

Math Greek Letter Bug Fixed

When Word 2007 and later versions write an RTF file that includes math alphanumeric symbols (see...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 06/26/2014

Crisp Text Display

Kaspar commented on my post Office Adopts New Windows Display Technology “I always wondered...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 05/31/2014

OpenType Math Tables

The math tables created for the math facility in Word 2007 and other Microsoft Office applications...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 04/27/2014

More precisely, this post is about BiDi Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). These objects...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 03/30/2014

More on Equation Numbering

The book Creating Research and Scientific Documents using Microsoft Word gives a method for...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 02/21/2014

Book on Technical Writing in Word

There’s a new Microsoft Press book on creating technical documents in Word, entitled Creating...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 01/15/2014

UTF-8 RTF

For RichEdit 4.0 (Windows XP SP1), I developed a UTF-8 version of the Rich Text Format (RTF). The...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 11/20/2013

RichEdit Hot Keys

This post summarizes the hot keys built into RichEdit. Previous posts have described various math...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 10/30/2013

RichEdit 8 Feature Additions

The time has come to summarize the features added in RichEdit 8, which shipped with Windows 8 and...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 09/07/2013

Emoji

Early in this century with texting becoming an increasingly popular way to communicate on cell...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 08/23/2013

Flyweight RichEdit Controls

Back when RichEdit 2.0 was being designed, Christian Fortini had a dream that every text string in a...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 07/25/2013

Arabic and Mathematical Enclosures

This post describes the Arabic subtending marks and discusses how their editing and display could be...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 06/30/2013

MathML on the Windows Clipboard

Sometimes people enquire how the Windows clipboard works and whether it supports MathML, jpeg, RTF...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 05/27/2013

Pasting Bitmaps into Text

In the (almost) old days, when you paste a bitmap into a rich-text editor, the editor would give it...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 04/29/2013

The Alpha Channel

One of our testers inserted a Microsoft logo image into RichEdit and saw an inky black rectangle....

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 03/16/2013

RichEdit 8 Performance Improvements

This post describes a couple of performance improvements introduced in RichEdit 8: 1) a more...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 02/22/2013

RichEdit 8.0 Touch Support

Windows 8 introduced substantially better touch facilities than those available in Windows 7. One...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 01/29/2013

Program Annotations

Notation is a favorite topic of mine being at least partly inspired by Bertrand Russell, who once...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 12/31/2012

RichEdit 8 Zoom Support

In this day and age with touch pinch and expand zooming of screens, zoom is everywhere! So you might...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 11/16/2012

Inserting Tables Using the Keyboard

This post describes a little trick that lets you insert a table into RichEdit and into Word just...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 10/12/2012

RichEdit 8.0 Accessibility

An important part of a computer’s user interface is to provide for user interaction...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 09/14/2012

RichEdit Spell Checking, Autocorrection and Prediction

RichEdit has provided support for client spell checking (TOM object model and temporary character...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 08/31/2012

Office Adopts New Windows Display Technology

Office 2013 has undergone a substantial shift to a relatively new display facility, Direct2D, and a...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 07/29/2012

Ligatures, Clusters, Combining Marks and Variation Sequences

On the surface, Unicode appears to be a just large collection of characters. But before Unicode text...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 06/29/2012

RichEdit 8.0 Image Support

Up until RichEdit 8.0, RichEdit’s native image support was limited to metafiles, enhanced...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 05/25/2012

RichEdit 8.0 TOM Table Interfaces

An earlier post describes the RichEdit nested table facility and how the EM_INSERTTABLE and...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 04/22/2012

RichEdit 8.0 Preview

There’s been a lot of buzz about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and it is really exciting. One...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 03/03/2012

RichEdit Character Formatting

RichEdit’s name derives from its ability to represent rich text. Such text is comprised of...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 02/08/2012

I started this blog in 2006 and now it’s 2012. How time flies! At this point it seems...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 01/09/2012

Keyboard Operator Shortcuts

The previous post introduces Hermann Klinke’s math input notation, which he developed to speed...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 12/02/2011

Math Accents

Accents are quite common in mathematical text. For example, in physics one uses one- to four-dot...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 10/30/2011

Office Insert Symbol Dialog

This blog post describes a cool insert-symbol facility built into Office applications like Word,...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 09/29/2011

Sans Serif Mathematical Symbols

Most mathematical documents and books use fonts with serifs, such as Times Roman. However...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 08/29/2011

Rendering MathML in HTML5

As you can see in this document, Presentation MathML is part of HTML5. This is very exciting, since...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 07/31/2011

Math Keyboard Shortcuts

Nali commented on the post Office 2007 Math Editing/Display that it would be nice to have keyboard...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 06/21/2011

NINCH and EMU

People have been asking about a couple of acronyms fairly often these days, so here’s a blog...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 05/07/2011

Two Math Typography Niceties

Roughly eight years ago, some colleagues and I had the good fortune to spend an extraordinary...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 04/30/2011

Equation Arrays

One user (Leperkawn) commented "There is basically no documentation on the \eqarray command so I'll...

Author: MurrayS3 Date: 03/30/2011

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