Hi Randy, I too suggest LaTeXiT. To add to what has already been suggested, LaTeXiT allows the assembly of a custom library of equations. You can send your collaborators this library as a file, and they could make minor edits to the equations in LaTexit gui editor without having to learn the full syntax of LaTeX. Minor edits would be self-explanatory to implement. Then they could export the edited equations for insertion into the current draft in MS Word. If they can't install LaTeXiT, you can send them the equations in the LaTeX format in a plain text file, and they could edit the equations in the LaTeXiT syntax, which can be deduced by comparing the syntax to the final equation. They could then return the edited plain text file to you for you to copy and paste into LaTeXiT. If that is too hard for them, they could always write out the edited equation on paper with a pen or pencil, scan it into a pdf, and e-mail it back to you for typesetting in LaTeXiT.
An alternative would be to move the document into RMarkdown via RStudio (a gui interface to R) which is much easier to master than LaTeX while still having access to the LaTeX equation syntax. This document can be quickly converted (by "knitting") to doc, pdf and html within the RStudio gui. The exported document might require additional editing if the conversion does not go well. If you are using ENDNOTE and not BibTeX for managing citations, the workflow may become more complicated. Best regards, Blaine Blaine Mooers, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Director of the Laboratory of Biomolecular Structure and Function Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center S.L. Young Biomedical Research Center Rm. 466 Shipping address: 975 NE 10th Street, BRC 466 Oklahoma City, OK 73104-5419 Letter address: P.O. Box 26901, BRC 466 Oklahoma City, OK 73190 office: (405) 271-8300 lab: (405) 271-8313 fax: (405) 271-3910 e-mail: blaine-moo...@ouhsc.edu Faculty webpage: http://www.oumedicine.com/department-of-biochemistry-and-molecular-biology/faculty/blaine-mooers-ph-d- Small Angle Scattering webpage: http://www.oumedicine.com/docs/default-source/ad-biochemistry-workfiles/small-angle-scattering-links-27aug2014.html?sfvrsn=0 X-ray lab webpage: http://www.oumedicine.com/department-of-biochemistry-and-molecular-biology/department-facilities/macromolecular-crystallography-laboratory ________________________________________ From: CCP4 bulletin board [CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] on behalf of Randy Read [rj...@cam.ac.uk] Sent: Monday, May 18, 2015 3:10 AM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: [ccp4bb] Equation Editor woes with Office 2011 for Mac Rather off-topic, but maybe someone on the list has found a way to work around this! There’s a problem with the Equation Editor in Office 2011 for Mac (i.e. the one that is based on a stripped-down version of MathType, which you get with Insert->Object->Microsoft Equation). You can insert an equation, re-open it and edit it several times, and then suddenly (and seemingly randomly) the equation object will be replaced by a picture showing the equation, which can no longer be edited. I’m writing a rather equation-heavy paper at the moment, and this is driving me crazy. This seems to be a known bug, which has existed from the release of Office 2011. Apparently it happens, unpredictably, when an AutoSave copy of the document is saved, so you can avoid it by turning off the AutoSave feature. The last time this drove me crazy, several years ago, I did try turning off AutoSave. For a while, I was very good about manually saving frequently, but I got into bad habits and eventually Word crashed after I had worked for several hours on a grant proposal without manually saving. So I turned AutoSave back on. At the moment, the least-bad solution seems to be to turn off AutoSave while I’m working on a document with lots of equations and then (hopefully) remember to turn it back on after that document is finished. But it would be great if someone has come up with a better cure for this problem. No doubt someone will suggest switching from Word to LaTeX, but I need to be able to collaborate on paper-writing, and even though I might be willing to invest the effort in learning LaTeX, I can’t really expect that of my collaborators. Most people in our field do use Microsoft Word, regardless of its failings. I’ve also tried using the professional version of MathType, but that requires your collaborators to install it as well — and I don’t think that cured the equation to picture problem anyway. Thanks! ----- Randy J. Read Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge Cambridge Institute for Medical Research Tel: +44 1223 336500 Wellcome Trust/MRC Building Fax: +44 1223 336827 Hills Road E-mail: rj...@cam.ac.uk Cambridge CB2 0XY, U.K. www-structmed.cimr.cam.ac.uk
