[lucida] LucidaBrightMath OT

[Bruno Voisin]

> Le 26 mars 2022 à 19:02, Stephen Moye <stephenmoye at mac.com> a écrit :
> 
> 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.

This does not answer your remark nor the original question, but while we're at it: you picked my curiosity here, as I have InDesign as part of a Creative Cloud subscription but never tried nor installed it (TeX is just fine for what I need, and I can't really afford the time to learn another app, especially given how convoluted Adobe's GUIs tend to be).

Looking at MathMagic <http://www.mathmagic.com>, on the Mac it seems to lag seriously behind: it's a 32-bit Intel app which runs on macOS 10.14 Mojave and below, not on the last three versions (10.15 Catalina, 11 Big Sur and 12 Monterey). The FAQ says they are working on a universal version for both 64-bit Intel and Apple Silicon M1 (ie ARM), hopefully for Q2 2022.

I tend to be worried by such announcements. The developers of MathType (a once popular equation editor for MS Office, and Pages and Keynote on the Mac), for example, said the same for over a year, and eventually switched to a web-based plugin only available for MS Office or Google docs, abandoning the stand-alone app that MathType once was.

In any case, like MathType, MathMagic seems to come with its own set of fonts (a number of them). Though packaged as OTF files, they seem essentially 8-bit or even 7-bit in design. So I'm not sure it would be possible to get MathMagic to work with Lucida OT.

About LaTeXiT <https://www.chachatelier.fr/latexit/>, the other solution that was mentioned: I use it routinely with Lucida (Type 1 or OpenType) or STIX Two to create equations for inclusion in Keynote presentations. You only need to add the Lucida-related lines in the LaTeX preamble of your equation. The LaTeX code is saved inside the associated PDF content within the Keynote file, so you can just afterwards paste back the equation inside LaTeXiT for further editing, and so forth, as many times as you need.

A remaining problem, of course, is proper baseline and spacing adjustment when an equation is included in text. For LibreOffice there is a plugin called TexMaths <http://roland65.free.fr/texmaths/>; I used it briefly at the time it was still OpenOffice and OOoLaTeX, it seemed to do the job (but it was based on bitmap equation images, not vector images like LaTeXiT).

Similarly, Pages and Keynote on the Mac now include Blahtex <https://github.com/gvanas/blahtexml> by default for their equations. I don't think it's possible to change the default fonts.

For InDesign, looking around, it seems there is a Java-based system for inclusion of (La)TeX equations, called In-TeX/LaTeX <https://github.com/cooldtp/InTeXLaTeX>. The documentation appears to be in Chinese, but online translators do a decent job of translating it into English (Safari on the Mac does, I assume it's using Google). Equations are typeset with XeLaTeX, which suits Lucida OT perfectly.

Bruno Voisin