User Guide

MathType User Manual
type of computer, including Macintosh computers running MathType for
Macintosh.
Warning
EPS files will only print
on a PostScript printer. If
you do not have a
printer that understands
the PostScript language,
then you will not want to
save equations as EPS
files.
When using the EPS file format, you have the choice of whether or not to include
a screen preview graphic (either WMF or TIFF) with the file. You will usually
want to include this screen preview because it allows the importing application
to show something on the screen while you are editing your document. If you
want to transfer the equation to a Macintosh computer that’s running MathType,
you should save it in EPS format with a TIFF screen graphic. This format is just a
plain text file and will avoid the graphics conversion problems you might
encounter with other formats.
The method for importing equation files will depend on the program you’re
using. See the sections on importing graphics or importing EPS files in your
application’s user manual.
GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) Files
GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is a standard format used for images on Web
pages, and is the only true bitmap format that MathType can produce.
Bitmap formats do not use fonts or languages; they simply define which dots to
turn on to create the image. As a result, bitmap formats are completely
transportable to any computer — whether the computer runs Macintosh OS,
Windows, Unix, or any other type of operating system. A disadvantage of
bitmap formats is that they do not print as well as formats in which MathType
can use fonts. If you are creating documents for the purpose of printing, you
should use high resolution (300 dpi or higher) GIF files, which may significantly
increase the size of your document. If you are creating documents to be viewed
electronically, screen resolution ( 72 or 96 dpi) GIF files are fine.
MathType provides several options that affect the kind of GIF image that is
saved — resolution (dots-per-inch), transparency, background color, and
smoothing. You can set these options using MathType’s Web and GIF
Preferences dialog, in the Preferences menu.
Smoothing is a particularly interesting GIF option. It uses a graphics technique
called anti-aliasing to smooth out the edges of characters and reduce “jaggies” by
displaying some of the edge pixels using a color that is intermediate between the
background and character colors.
Automatically Numbering Files
If you work with equations in individual files, you will probably create a lot of
them. MathType has the ability to automatically number files that you save. This
makes it easy to create a series of equations with filenames like Eqn1.wmf,
Eqn2.wmf, Eqn3.wmf and so on. You can set the actual filename pattern in the
Save As dialog. See MathType’s online help for more information on this feature.
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