Free equation editor?

[RThompson]

Hi there,

Can anyone suggest a good free equation editor?
Not the Word editor.

Thanks,
Rob

[MikeJohns]

RThompson

Unfortunately the free ones that I have seen are limited to very basic equations and tend to be eclipsed by Offices equation editor.

If you can get your paws on Mathcad (it's not free) it is brilliant, will also do all the maths as well.

email me if you want more info.

[marshmat]

The MS Office and WordPerfect Office equation editors are both actually a greatly downgraded version of MathType. (The older Word equation editors were replaced with the MathType kernel when it was noticed that WordPerfect was handling equations far better with MathType than Word was with its own editor.) MathType is not too expensive and quite powerful and intuitive.
I use Maple for most of my mathematics; it's horrendously expensive for a commercial licence but that's what university discounts/sitelicences are for. Extremely powerful tool but kind of hard to learn the language.

[MikeJohns]

marshmat

Maple is I believe the engine in Mathcad but with a nice user interface.

[jam007]

Open Office have an equation editor that is similar to the one in MS Office. I would actually say better since you can write your equations by typing ( like this F = { m_1 * m_2 } over r^2 ) and it is more easily upgraded/customized.
http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html

You get a fully working modern office suite at the same time for free (MS Office compatible). Not a bad deal

For those (like me) who can´t afford Mathcad/Maple to solve their equations have a look at MUpad or Octave or GNUplot depending on your needs.
http://www.mupad.de/about.html (can do everything)
http://www.octave.org/ (can do anything numerical)
http://www.gnuplot.info/ (an plot anything plottable and calculate many things)

Anders M

[Leo Lazauskas]

Originally Posted by RThompson

Hi there,

Can anyone suggest a good free equation editor?
Not the Word editor.

Thanks,
Rob

LaTex is probably the package of choice for mathematical type setting. MikTex and the WinEdt editor work beautifully together.

[Tim B]

I'm not a fan of LaTex, I have found that using Open-Office is more often than not quicker and easier. Like most things, it's a question of what you know, but Open-office is not hard to learn.

Tim B.

[D'ARTOIS]

Open Office is my favorite program - I have Windows as well but hardly use it

[h_zwakenberg]

if your numerical stuff is about statistics too, you might want to check out http://cran.r-project.org/. 'R' is an OpenSource clone of a commercial statistics package called 'S'.

bye
Hans

[RThompson]

Wow, thanks for the replies.
lots of leads to look at...

Thanks again , Rob