realhats: Writing a $\LaTeX$ Package

A few months ago, Adam Townsend went to lunch and had a conversation. I wasn’t there, but I imagine the conversation went something like this:

Smitha: Hello.
Smitha: You know how the \hat command in LaTeΧ puts a caret above a letter?… Well I was thinking it would be funny if someone made a package that made the \hat command put a picture of an actual hat on the symbol instead?
Adam: (After a few hours of laughter.) I’ll see what my flatmate is up to this weekend…
Jeff: What on Earth are you two talking about?!

As anyone who has been anywhere near maths at a university in the last ∞ years will be able to tell you, LaTeΧ (or $\LaTeX$) is a piece of maths typesetting software. It’s a bit like a version of Word that runs in terminal and makes PDFs with really pretty equations.

By default, LaTeΧ can’t do very much, but features can easily added by importing packages: importing the graphicsx package allows you to put images in your PDF; importing geometry allows you to easily change the page margins; and importing realhats makes the \hat command put real hats above symbols.

MathType and WIRIS Join Forces

A little bit of news for those who, through necessity or ignorance or unique personal whimsy, use a WYSIWYG editor for putting equations into computers.

WIRIS, whose technology is used in things like the virtual learning environment Blackboard, have bought Design Science, makers of MathType. MathType became the de facto standard equation editor for Microsoft Word back before its built-in solution was any good, but has somewhat stagnated recently. The press release says, “by combining our teams we will now be able to offer education, scientific and publishing communities newer products at a fast pace”. I think that’s a long way of saying they’re not going to duplicate their efforts any more.

Here’s a mixed fraction: $2 \frac{2}{3}$
And here’s a non-mixed fraction: $\frac{8}{3}$
Actually, here’s an interesting fact about that number: $2 \sqrt{ \frac{2}{3} } = \sqrt{ 2 \frac{2}{3} }$