[lucida] LucidaBrightMath OT

[Stephen Moye]

To be sure, doing math in any DTP (hateful concept) application is painful, at best — indeed, traditionally, math has been termed ‘penalty type’ because authors were charged extra for its use. Thus far, the only way to get any quantity of math into any GUI app has been via TeX in one form or another — certainly, InDesign’s character palette is deplorably lame. 

The American Mathematical Society for several decades has published “Notices of the American Mathematical Society” (“Notices” for short) entirely using Lucida. Up until about 2013 or so, they used Quark Xpress; math was done using a plugin that read the TeX code (anything delimited by $…$ or $$…$$), TeXed the math and deftly returned a graphic of the math into the file replacing the TeX code. When the Society changed over to InDesign, TeX class (.cls) files were created to duplicate the look of the InDesign-generated portions of the journal. At various times, attempts were made to find a convenient (note that word) alternative to TeX — none were ever found. I will say that, so far as I am aware, 99.9% of Notices readership was ever aware of the transition from Xpress to Indesign, or the use of TeX in place of InDesign (for math articles) after 2013. I worked for the AMS for a number of years and assisted in the transition from Xpress to InDesign.

I would say that there really is no alternative (convenient or otherwise) to TeX for typesetting math, at least to suit mathematicians who are notoriously fussy about that sort of thing. Yes, there is a learning curve, but the reward is beautifully typeset math. There is a wonderful application, “LaTeXit” that, reasonably easily, converts TeX to a graphic and can paste it into a file. There is also a math plugin, Math+Magic, that works natively in InDesign, and which seems to understand TeX. It, too, relies on palettes so can be fairly laborious, particularly if you have to typeset a lot of math. There would appear to be a ‘batch conversion’ function which does something with LaTeX. I have not used the plugin.

SGM