User Guide

Chapter 8: Advanced Formatting
MathType's Font and Character Knowledge
MathType has a built-in database containing a considerable amount of
knowledge on fonts and the characters they contain. For each font, this
knowledge consists of:
• A list of the characters it contains.
• Its PostScript font name, used for generating EPS files.
For each character, which may be a member of several fonts, this knowledge
consists of:
• Its description (“Less-than or equal”, for example).
• Its usual role in mathematical equations (“variable” or “relational operator”,
for example).
• The preferred MathType style to use when inserted into an equation.
Unicode and MTCode
Unicode Web Site
To find out more about
Unicode, the Unicode
Consortium’s Web site
at www.unicode.org is a
good place to start.
MTCode or Unicode?
You may see the
MTCode value for
characters in several
places in MathType.
However, the value will
be labelled, if at all, by
“Unicode”. This is
because Unicode is the
more familiar term.
Those in the know will
remember that
“MTCode” would be a
more accurate label.
A key component in MathType’s representation of its font and character
knowledge is its use of Unicode. Unicode is a system that assigns an integer
value to every character used in the written languages of the world, plus many
characters that are in use in mathematics and other technical disciplines.
The bad news on Unicode is that it doesn’t come very close to having
assignments for all the characters in use in math and science. The good news is
that the Unicode Standard provides a Private Use Area — a range of values that
can be used by companies like Design Science to assign as they see fit. We have
extended Unicode by adding all the “missing” math and science characters and
have named it MTCode. MTCode is a superset of Unicode that MathType uses
internally to represent all the characters that are used in its equations.
Some examples may help to make the MTCode idea more concrete. Here are the
MTCode values for a few characters:
Character MTCode value
A 0x0041
€ (the new Euro currency symbol) 0x20AC
↑ 0x2191
% 0xE932
A few things to note about these examples:
• The values are shown in hexadecimal (base-16) notation. This is customary in
the Unicode world.
• The value for A is the same as its value in ASCII, a standard that has been in
use for many years to represent characters in computers.
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