Equation Inserting

It's a pain, but I'll give it a try.


If that worked, you should see Newton's universal law of graduation corrected for a finite range of gravity.

Okay; that's showing black type on my windows default background color (beige). I guess if I want it to blend in, I'll have to set the text to white and background color to blue before doing the Alt/Ptscr from Word. To get the right shade of blue, I go to the forum page and click "View/Source" and find the right color tag, i.e., "<td bgcolor="#0063C8"....>. Converting to decimal, I get 00,99,200; I create a new color for the page in Word, and voiala! I'll use the "_m" ending on the flickr link to get a readable size. Like this:

That only took a couple of hours. If I do this often enough, I guess practice makes easy.

PS: I still got the wrong background color. Now that I look more closely, the color alternates between two shades of blue, and I didn't match either of them.

Fractal Foam Model of Universes: Creator

I know that it is a pain to convert, I just thought that with some of the larger, more intricate equations, that it would be easier for folks to see and understand...

Mark Vitrone

Thank you Mark, Phil,

A few thoughts about this process.

Matching the background color seems not too important to me. But it can be done so why not?

If you have a scanner, you can do equations and drawings by hand, scan them and insert them into your post like any other image. My experience with this suggests that cutting a standard leter size page in half (cut one 8.5 X 11 into two 5.5 X 8.5) gives you just the right size canvas for this message board.

Consider using a compressed format like jpeg rather than a bitmap. Most painting programs will save a bitmap in several compressed formats.

LB

One more note - in the early days this editor had a math symbol package built into it. It did not do everything, but it did most things.

However, it was a bit of a problem to maintain and no one used it. So one time when an upgrade came alone we just stopped installing this part. No one even noticed.

LB

All,

This thread was mainly informational. I am going to test the reversal process today, when a get a few minutes I am going to go back to some old messages and grab the single line based equations (for example e=mc^2), paste these into word and then let it convert it into a real equation....I posted the thread mainly in response to some of the threads in the last two weeks where some confusion as to what an equation was doing came into question. Additionally, while at first this is time-consuming, Word allows you to save the equations into an equation bank so to speak. When teaching physics at the high school, one of the tools I use with students is an Equations Toolbox....a collection of indexed equations that define the variables, the units, and the reason for using the equation....this is a suggestion that has been taken to the college level by previous students who have reported much success (even at the post-grad level). One of my first students 8 years ago has just earned a pHd in Chemistry and has BS in Physical Chemistry (He is a MM disciple btw). Anyway, he brought a notebook to me, you know one of those marbled black and white comp books. It was his equation toolbox from HS....except that it had ALL of the equations he had learned throughout his whole education...That book is near him in his workplace today. Good habits start with small steps....

Equations can be confusing even if they are presented in a perfect typeset format (see the examples above). One equation by itself is generally not a problem, but if your argument uses a series of equations it can be difficult to keep the various symbols and subscripts straight.

Possible train of thought as a reader looks at your post ...
(Was m_1 the source mass or the target mass? I'd better go back and check ... oh screw it. I don't care any more. The other post sounded more interesting, and besides that author usually makes his ideas easier to read.)

===

A way to help your audience keep track of such things is to "un-simplify" your notation. Use the symbols m_source and m_target instead of m_1 and m_2 for instance. It takes more typing. It is not as "compact". But it is easier to understand.

Here is an example that is not so trivial as the above, and therefore might help to illustrate my point better.

<hr noshade size="1">
In a discussion of the relationship between acceleration and force due to the action of gravity, you present two equations:
Even if you explain in the supporting text that m_1 is the target mass, m_2 is the source mass, F is the force between the two masses and a is the acceleration of the target mass in the field of the source mass, a reader will probably have to keep coming back to these definitions if you refer to these symbols later in your discussion.

However, if you use more explanatory symbols this distraction can be minimized. (The symbols r and G could also be clarified, if you desire. It depends on how complex the overall argument will be.)

It is harder to write the equations this way because it takes more typing. BFD. Note, however, that you do not need to spend so much time writing definitions in your supporting text. If your goal is to communicate your ideas to your audience, you want to do all you can to make their job of understanding you as easy as it can be.
<hr noshade size="1">

BTW, I am convinced that some of the people who post here are not actually interested in clearly communicating their ideas. But that is another story ...


Food for thought,
LB