OOoLaTeX or OpenOffice and mathematical formulas.

Printers relate mathematical work to convicts ...
D.E. Knut. Mathematical typography.

More than a year ago, when I decided that I would switch to fully licensed software, the choice to buy Microsoft Office or switch to OpenOffice was not very hard - it’s very difficult for a student to find extra money. The happiness from the fact that OO performs almost everything that is required of it ended rather quickly at the moment when I opened the built-in formula editor OO.Math. To say that he is bad is to say nothing. It was clear that you need to look for another tool.

Initially, the choice fell on Design Science MathType , which allowed you to work in almost the same editor as MSO (MS Equation is nothing more than a stripped-down MathType), but working with OLE objects was tedious and never amenable to automation. In addition, I thought that when switching to a Linux system, I would lose the ability to work with formulas again.
Looking through other means of extending the functionality or replacing OO.Math did not give anything but disappointment. All projects were very raw or not functional enough.
I continued the search and was rewarded: I found OOoLaTeX .
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To be honest, before that, I read about TeX systems only briefly when I was interested in the writings of Donald Knuth , the author of this system and the series of remarkable books on algorithms. I knew that the capabilities of TeX systems are huge. As it was well noticed, “Sometimes people who are unfamiliar with TeX technologies hear that LaTeX is suitable only for a set of mathematics. When I get acquainted with true TeXnologies, an understanding arises that LaTeX is so good that with its help you can even recruit math. ”Therefore, I had no doubt about the possibilities offered by TeX.

So what did OOoLaTeX suggest? The idea is very simple, use a special macro to write formula notation in TeX, after which he (the macro) gave it to the TeX rendering engine and inserted the result as an image into an OO document. That is, we get a number of advantages:

• Cross platform TeX exists for almost all platforms.
• Portability Inserted OOoLaTeX formulas in the form of pictures will open in any OO. Restriction will be only for editing.
• Functionality. LaTeX is probably the most functional tool for a set of mathematical formulas.

For justice, it is worth noting a number of disadvantages:

• Large enough. Up to 160Mb above normal OO sizes for the LaTeX system.
• Problems with export to MS Word. Because of the differences in the parameters of the images inserted into the text in Word, the formulas do not align with the text line, because of which the formulas “rise” above all the text.
• Minor glitches. Until now, occasionally there is a problem with trimming and running the script.

I think many will agree with me that the merits cover all the disadvantages. In this article, I will describe only the installation on MS Windows (yes, I still bought it and did not switch to Linux), the installation for Linux can be found both in the official documentation and here . To do this, you need to download the following programs:

• MiKTeX - TeX system. Although you can use any other available TeX package.
• GhostScript is a package for converting DVI files generated by TeX into convenient png files.
  Msys - mini-emulator * nix-s under Windows.
  OOoLaTeX is a script for OO binding the entire system together.