User Guide

MathType User Manual
• The first three examples are part of Unicode — the last is part of MathType’s
extension to Unicode, MTCode.
Font Encodings
Many fonts on your computer share the same arrangement of characters. For
example, in your word processor when you press the “A” key you get the first
letter of the Latin alphabet whether your current font is Arial or Times New
Roman. Similarly, hitting the same key when the current font is Symbol or Euclid
Symbol will give you a Greek alpha. The concept of “font encoding” is used to
capture these relationships. Another common term that means the same thing is
“character set”.
In MathType, a font encoding is a named table of MTCode values, one for each
position in the fonts that share the encoding. You can see the encoding
MathType has assigned to each font on your computer by using the Insert
Symbol command on the Edit menu.
The Insert Symbol Dialog
MTCode Values
If you want to see
MTCode values
displayed in the status
bar as you pass the
mouse pointer over
characters in the
toolbar, choose the
Workspace Preferences
command on the
Preferences menu and
check “Show character
and template codes in
the status bar”.
Using the Insert Symbol dialog, you can browse all the fonts available on your
computer. This is also the best place to see MathType’s font and character
knowledge.
Once you select a font in the “View by” section at the top of the dialog, you can
see the font’s encoding. For the character selected in the grid, you can also see its
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