Wrong Characters Displayed in Equations in Editor Window

The information in this document applies to:

Issue

Many users find that when typing characters or selecting templates in MathType or the Equation Editor, inappropriate characters are displayed.

Reason

There are many types of font encodings. Text fonts, such as Times New Roman, have an ANSI encoding that contains Roman letters, Arabic numerals, punctuation marks, and other special text symbols. Arial, Courier, Garamond, New York, Palatino are some other fonts that have standard ANSI encodings, as is the Euclid font included with MathType 4.0 for Windows. The fonts that you would use in an email or word processing document have ANSI encodings.

Symbolic fonts have other characters. The Symbol font, for example, has Greek letters, mathematical operators and symbols, and characters which are used to construct large integrals, parentheses, braces, and brackets. The Symbol font does not include Roman letters. The MT Extra font, which is included with MathType and the Equation Editor, includes additional characters which are not present in the Symbol font or fonts with ANSI encodings.

If a font with an inappropriate encoding is assigned to one of the Styles for MathType or Equation Editor, the result will be equations with inappropriately substituted characters.

MathType 4 and 5 users should not experience this problem because these newer versions of MathType are aware of the encodings that fonts use and will not allow a font lacking the necessary characters to be assigned to one of their Styles.

Solution

To correct this problem, assign fonts with appropriate encodings to MathType or Equation Editor's Styles.

1. Assigning appropriate fonts to your Styles in MathType 3.x for Mac

2. Assigning appropriate fonts to your Styles in MathType 3.x for Windows

3. Assigning appropriate fonts to Equation Editor's styles

Assigning appropriate fonts to your Styles in MathType 3.x for Macintosh

1. Launch MathType.
2. Choose Define from Style menu to display the Define Styles dialog, shown below. If you are not using the latest version of MathType for Mac, your dialog may look slightly different and lack the Defaults button.

3. If you have the Defaults button, simply clicking it will assign MathType's default fonts, which will correct substitution problems.
4. The font assigned for Text, Function, Variable, Vector-Matrix, and Number should be a text font. Choose the same one that you are using for text in your document if you want your text and equations to match. Times, if installed, is the default.
5. The Symbol font should be assigned to the U.C. Greek (Uppercase Greek letters), L.C. Greek (Lowercase Greek letters), and Symbol styles.
6. Typically, variables and lowercase Greek letters are italicized and letters representing vectors and matrices are bolded.
7. User 1 and 2 are user-defined and can be set to use whatever fonts you want. For more information about using the User 1 and User 2 styles, please see page 7-5 of your MathType User Manual. 
8. Click OK.

From this point, inappropriate characters should not be substituted in your equations. For more information concerning MathType and its use of styles and fonts, please consult Chapter 7 of your MathType User Manual.

Assigning appropriate fonts to your Styles in MathType 3.x for Windows

1. Launch MathType.
2. Choose Define from Style menu to display the Define Styles dialog, shown below..

3. The font assigned for Text, Function, Variable, Vector-Matrix, and Number should be a text font. Choose the same one that you are using for text in your document if you want your text and equations to match. Times New Roman, if installed, is the default.
4. The Symbol font should be assigned to the U.C. Greek (Uppercase Greek letters), L.C. Greek (Lowercase Greek letters), and Symbol styles.
5. User 1 and 2 are user-defined and can be set to use whatever fonts you want. For more information about using the User 1 and User 2 styles, please see page 7-5 of your MathType User Manual. 
6. Typically, variables and lowercase Greek letters are italicized and letters representing vectors and matrices are bolded.
7. Click OK.

From this point, inappropriate characters should not be substituted in your equations. For more information concerning MathType and its use of styles and fonts, please consult Chapter 7 of your MathType User Manual.

Assigning appropriate fonts to your Styles in Equation Editor

1. Launch the Equation Editor. You can do this by double-clicking on an equation, inserting a new equation, or double-clicking on the Equation Editor icon.
2. Choose Define from Style menu to display the Styles dialog, which should be similar to the one shown below, but may be different, depending on if you are using Windows or Macintosh, and which program Equation Editor was included with.

3. The font assigned for Text, Function, Variable, Vector-Matrix, and Number should be a text font. Choose the same one that you are using for text in your document if you want your text and equations to match. Times New Roman, if installed, is the default.
4. The Symbol font should be assigned to the U.C. Greek (Uppercase Greek letters), L.C. Greek (Lowercase Greek letters), and Symbol styles.
5. Typically, variables and lowercase Greek letters are italicized and letters representing vectors and matrices are bolded.
6. Click OK.

From this point, inappropriate characters should not be substituted in your equations.

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