LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA, September 5, 2002 – Design Science today announced the release of MathPlayer 1.0, which enables STM publishers (Science/Technical/Medical) to present mathematical web content with high-quality display, print and interaction within Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Windows web browser. With the release of MathPlayer, and the recent preview release of Netscape 7 with MathML support, wide adoption of MathML for publishing math on the web is expected.

In an effort to accelerate the adoption of MathML in the math, science, and education communities, MathPlayer can be downloaded free from the MathPlayer product area of the Design Science website (www.dessci.com). Anyone publishing web pages that include MathML can use the company's "Download MathPlayer" button on their web pages, linking their readers to the free software.

In addition to enabling high-quality display of mathematics in Internet Explorer, MathPlayer provides a right-click menu that allows the user to copy mathematics from the web page into MathML-enabled software such as graphing and calculation applications, as well as into HTML and XML authoring tools for use in new content. MathPlayer 1.0 allows copying to the system clipboard, drag-and-drop, as well as commands to open equations in Design Science's other MathML-enabled products, MathType and WebEQ.

"The lack of high-quality support for mathematics in web browsers has been a long-standing sore spot for scientific publishers and researchers," said Mark Walter, Senior Editor, The Seybold Report. “With MathPlayer, Design Science is providing welcome relief to a user community that's struggled for years with this issue.” MathPlayer has been selected as a Seybold Publications Editors’ Hot Pick and will be demonstrated at the Seybold Exposition in San Francisco, September 10-12, 2002.

Design Science is working with other software vendors and STM publishers to MathML-enable their products. "Now that we've licked the problem of displaying MathML in web pages, we can add value at the reader end by enabling math to be communicated to other applications. Educators, students, scientists, and engineers will no longer be satisfied with mathematics displayed as dead images and PDFs," notes Paul Topping, President & CEO of Design Science. The company expects to license MathPlayer to software vendors and content publishers that want to distribute it with their products. Custom versions of MathPlayer can be created that add application or content-specific commands (e.g. "Plot with Acme Graph").

Design Science also offers its MathType and WebEQ products for creating and editing MathML and documents containing mathematics. The company has played a leading role in developing MathML and continues to be actively involved in the W3C Math Working Group. The company also publishes a semi-annual paper, "Math on the Web: A Status Report", available on its web site: www.dessci.com.

About MathML

MathML is a standards-based markup language for encoding mathematics using XML, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Math Working Group (www.w3.org/math).

About Design Science, Inc.

Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Long Beach, California, Design Science, Inc., develops software used by scientists, engineers and educators, including MathType, Equation Editor in Microsoft Office, WebEQ, MathPlayer and TeXaide, to communicate on the web and in print.

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Contact:

Bruce Virga
Vice President Sales
brucev@dessci.com
800-827-0685
562-432-2920

Design Science, Inc.
140 Pine Avenue, 4th Floor
Long Beach, CA 90802, USA