User Guide
Chapter 7: Fonts, Styles, Sizes and Spacing
Last printed 8/20/2001 9:40 AM
Chapter 7
Fonts, Styles, Sizes and Spacing
Introduction
This chapter tells you how MathType assigns fonts, styles, sizes, and spacing to
the characters in equations and how you can change the automatic assignments
to give your equations a different look.
Styles
Each character in a MathType equation is either assigned a specific font and
character style, or is assigned one of eleven “styles.” MathType’s styles are
somewhat analogous to text styles in word processing and page layout
applications. Each one is defined as a combination of a font and character style
(e.g. Times, bold & italic or Symbol, bold). Styles save you from having to worry
about fonts and character styles separately, and hence speed up your work and
help you maintain consistency in your equations. Also, by changing the
definition of a style, you can quickly change the appearance of all the characters
that use it. You can change the definitions of any of the styles using the Define
command on the Style menu.
The Primary Font
In most kinds of documents, you will choose a font, character style (bold, italic),
and point size for the main body of the text in your document. We call this the
“primary font”. Usually, you will want your equations to be based on the
primary font — functions like “sin” and “cos” will be in the primary font, as will
numbers; variables will share the same font, but in italic, and so on.
The following subsections describe each of MathType’s eleven styles and how
they are used:
Math
Math is not a style in the same sense as the other styles, although we tend to refer
to it that way occasionally in this manual. Rather, it is a mode which causes
MathType to automatically assign the appropriate style to function names,
variables, symbols, and numbers as you type. The Math style is discussed further
below in the section entitled Function Recognition.
Text
You should use the Text style when you want to enter words rather than
mathematical formulas. You will normally define your Text style to be the same
font and character style as your primary font.
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