A few colleagues of mine edit long math books on Word, with inserted equations from MathType. These are large books (200 pages and up), and Word frequently freezes. I believe that Scrivener would be more stable, and the whole thing would be more manageable. I would like to suggest a Scrivener workflow. Do you have experience importing Word/MathType files into Scrivener, and exporting them back? What happens when a Scrivener compiled file with equations is exported to other programs, InDesign, for example?
Any thoughts, suggestions, help, and feedback on this topic will be very valuable to us. Thank you.
The main limitation, which may block this as being an option for your group, for this current project, is that MathType files as editable objects do not easily communicate between different programs as a general rule, because the standard formats used to transfer data from X to Y are themselves not set up to fully support what MT needs (RTFD works, but hardly anything works with that format directly). They will show up to be clear, in most cases, but as a raster snapshot of the original equation rather than something you can open in MathType and edit (and some programs won’t even do that. I noticed Pages seems to destroy all equations in the output when saving as .docx).
Secondly, this may be a factor depending on your group, we don’t really tout having MathType support for the Windows version. This is for no reason we have control over, from our side the feature basically works the same way as it does on a Mac—the problem is that MathType itself has unusable output quality on Windows (how it works in Word is entirely different than what everyone else has to use). However if at least one team-member has a Mac, they can be the one doing the compiling (which is probably a good idea anyway).
Now if you’re strictly asking about Scrivener->InDesign, not importing functional MT equations from Word, but instead using Scrivener as the starting point and for all content and equation edits, but InDesign for final production, then that might work better. I’m not familiar enough with the workflow to offer any precise suggestions, but one thing is that a read-only raster may be fine for what you need at that point, if the quality is sufficient. Another thing is that there may be good ways to basically replace all of the MT images produced during compile with high-quality editable version in InDesign with a simple re-link. Again, I don’t really know what I’m talking about though, these are just directions I would investigate.
Thank you, that’s a lot to think about. Right now, the workflow would be something like this: author writes in Word for Windows, editor edits on Word for Mac (or, perhaps, Scrivener for Mac), designer designs on InDesign for Mac… The author is the starting point of all this, and if there is no way to do that correctly on Scrivener for Windows (that’s if we can convince them all to use Scrivener instead of Word), this may not work at all… But I love to find new, more efficient ways to do work. We’ll play around with the software, and let you know if we succeed. Thanks again.
