PMean: Equations using MathType

I’m ordinarily not a big fan of commercial software, but one product that I would have a hard time living without is MathType. It produces mathematical equations with ease and the appearance is almost always perfect. It’s hard to do this, especially with equations have lots of superscripts and subscripts. You get the size or spacing wrong and all of a sudden things look really ugly and it is hard to fix. TeX is a very good product, too, but I have grown so used to MathType that it is really hard to make the switch.  I had to upgrade MathType recently to version 6.9 and I wanted to experiment with MathType equations on my blog. Here are some examples.

Here’s a simple equation related to something called the power prior.

This is the default option, which saves the file at 96 dots per inch (dpi). The letters are a bit fuzzy.

Here’s the same equation where the default file is saved at 120 dpi. It’s a bit cleaner, but seems a bit out of proportion with the regular text.

The default options under “Other” is 300 dpi and it looks sharp and crisp, but way too large.

One final choice is 240 dpi (see above). Again, way too big. This choice actually, though, works well for PowerPoint where the font sizes are so much larger.