For Immediate Release

MathDaisy Adds Math Support to DAISY Production Tools

MathDaisy, now in beta, adds math support to the DAISY Consortium's DAISY Pipeline and Microsoft's Save As DAISY products

Orlando, Florida — January 28, 2009 — At the ATIA 2009 Conference today, Design Science announced the release of the MathDaisy beta, an add-on for the DAISY Consortium's DAISY Pipeline and Microsoft's Save As DAISY products, which are also expected to be released as betas at ATIA. MathDaisy adds support for mathematical equations, making them accessible to students, teachers, engineers, and scientists with disabilities.

DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) is an XML standard for producing accessible and navigable multimedia documents, including Digital Talking Books (DTBook), digital text books, and synchronized audio/text books. DAISY is a globally recognized standard for accessible content. It is used by NIMAS (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard) for accessible K-12 textbooks and by ePub, a widely used standard for digital books. The latest version of the DAISY standard requires that mathematics be represented in MathML, the World Wide Web Consortium's standard for representing math notation in XML.

MathDaisy is Design Science's add-in for both the DAISY Pipeline software and the Save As DAISY add-in for Microsoft Word. These products both convert documents into DAISY's DTBook format. If the original documents contain mathematical equations, then users of those products will need MathDaisy to handle them and make them accessible.

Save As DAISY is an open source software package developed by Microsoft. Once installed, it adds a "Save As Daisy" command to Microsoft Word XP, 2003, and 2007. This command converts an open Microsoft Word document into DAISY's DTBook format, making use of the DAISY Pipeline. MathDaisy installs into Save As Daisy adding math support.

The DAISY Pipeline and Save as DAISY work just fine for many user's needs. However, organizations with their own publishing workflow, or those wanting to create a more automated or more powerful DAISY production facility, should be interested in Design Science's MathFlow line of products.

About Design Science

Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Long Beach, California, Design Science develops software used by educators, scientists and publishing professionals, including MathType, Equation Editor in Microsoft Office, WebEQ, MathFlow and MathPlayer, to communicate on the web and in print. For more information please visit www.dessci.com.

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