User Guide

MathType User Manual

make the insertion point cycle through all the slots in the formula. If you hold

down the S

HIFT key while you do this, the insertion point will cycle through the

slots in the reverse direction. Try this out to see how it works. Three of the

positions that the insertion point will assume during the course of this cycling

are shown below. Use a viewing scale of 400% or 800%, so that you can see

what’s happening a little better:

If you use the Show Nesting command on the View menu, you can get an even

better picture of the hierarchical arrangement of slots in your equation:

We have to decide which of these insertion point positions is the right one for

adding the

sin x. The position on the left is clearly wrong — we don’t want the

sin

x to go in the denominator of the fraction. In the position shown in the center,

the insertion point is in the main slot under the square root sign, so if we type in

sin

x the result will be the following formula:

This is not what we want either. The insertion point position shown on the far

right is the correct one; the insertion point is outside the square root, which is

where we want the sin

x to go.

Functions

You can customize the

list of functions that

MathType automatically

recognizes. Tutorial 4

contains an example.

10. Keep pressing the Tab key until the insertion point arrives in the correct

position, and then type in the letters sinx. Type slowly, so that you can watch

what happens. When you initially type them, the s and the i will be italic,

because MathType assumes that they are variables. However, as soon as you

type the n, MathType recognizes that sin is an abbreviation for the sine function.

Following standard typesetting rules, MathType uses plain Roman (non-italic)

format for the sin, and inserts a thin space (one sixth of an em) between the sin

and the x.