Tutorial

Using MathType with SMART Board Software

This tutorial offers some "best practice" tips on how to use MathType with SMART Board Software, hereafter referred to as SMART Notebook. Instruction in the use of SMART Boards and SMART Notebook is beyond the scope of this article, except as they relate to MathType. If you need more information about SMART Boards or SMART Notebook, refer to the documentation supplied with these products, or refer to the SMART Technologies web site.

In this tutorial, we assume you are already familiar with the basic use of MathType. If you need additional instruction on using MathType, a good place to start is Chapter 4 of the MathType User Manual. If you don't have a printed copy of the manual, there is a copy on your computer, assuming you have MathType installed. You can find the manual in Start > All Programs > MathType 5 > MathType User Manual. This path to the User Manual is Windows-specific, as are the screen shots and instructions in this tutorial. If you are using MathType with SMART Notebook on a Macintosh computer, you would follow steps similar to what we outline here.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Working with existing Microsoft Word documents
3. Inserting equations into Notebooks created from scratch
4. Importing a PowerPoint presentation into a SMART Notebook

Introduction

Users of MathType with Microsoft Office and other similar programs are accustomed to the high-quality output produced when these products are used together. Your equations won't look the same in SMART Notebook as they do in Word. The basic reason for this is that SMART Notebook does not have the capability of displaying a "vector" graphic, such as a WMF; it is only capable of "bitmap" graphics, such as a GIF or JPG. As an illustration of the major difference between the two types of graphics, compare the following two representations of the square root of two, both shown at 10x normal size:

Bitmap graphic at 10x normal size	Vector graphic at 10x normal size

Granted, at magnification this high the differences are exaggerated, perhaps unfairly so. The differences between bitmap and vector graphics become most apparent when printing or when scaling the graphics larger or smaller than the size at which they were created.

In this tutorial, we will show how to work around the limitations of bitmap graphics when using SMART Notebook. One of the things we'll do is set MathType's GIF preferences so that it produces GIFs with "anti-aliasing". Anti-aliasing is a technique to smooth the edges of bitmap graphics, which for large equations such as the ones you'll be projecting, will greatly increase the quality. For "normal-sized" equations (say, 18pt and below), anti-aliasing actually decreases the quality of the graphic, since it blends shades of gray with the black and white pixels that make up the graphic. (Actually, it doesn't always use gray. The actual colors used depend on the color of the equation and its background. For our use here, we're using black equations on a white background, so the fill-in colors will be shades of gray.) Compare the equations below:

12pt, no anti-aliasing	12pt, with anti-aliasing	32pt, no anti-aliasing	32pt, with anti-aliasing

You'll no doubt notice at some point that there is indeed an option in SMART Notebook to import a WMF, which is a vector graphic. If you try this, the import will be successful, but the software will still convert it to a bitmap before it places it into your Notebook. The quality will be much worse than what you'll get if you follow the steps below, and just go with bitmaps from the start.

Working with existing Microsoft Word documents

It's likely that many of your documents are already in Microsoft Word format, with either MathType or Equation Editor equations. You will be able to convert these documents into a SMART Notebook, but it's not an easy, one-step process. By following the steps below, the process will be as easy as possible though, and the quality of the equations will be the best they can be, given the limitations of bitmap graphics.

SMART Notebook doesn't have direct import capability for Word documents. It's possible to copy the entire document, then paste it into SMART Notebook, but that only pastes the text. To import the equations as well, follow these steps:

Recommendation: It's a good idea to work on a copy of your document, so you don't accidentally make unintended changes to the original. If you're working with either Word 2002 (Office XP) or Word 2003, there's a fairly easy way to open a copy of the document. In Word's File menu, click on Open, as you would to open any Word document. In the Open dialog, navigate to the file you wish to open, click once on it, then click the downward-pointing triangle next to the Open button at the lower right of the dialog. (If you click the button itself, instead of the triangle, the file will open. We're not ready to open it yet.) Clicking the downward-pointing triangle results in this menu of choices:

Click on Open as Copy. Now proceed with the steps below…

1. Since the Notebook will be projected, we'll need a larger font size than we used for the printed document. Increasing the font size is a 2-step process—first the text, then the equations:
   1. With the document open in Word, select the entire document. Normally, when you select text, you hold down the left mouse button as you drag the mouse pointer across the text. When you want to select the entire document, a quicker way to do it is to click Edit > Select All, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A. (That's a very useful shortcut to remember, because it works in virtually every software application you'll use. For example, it works in MathType, PowerPoint, Excel, and most others.) From the Formatting Toolbar, select the font size you want. In this case, we'll use 24pt:

2. Now we need to change the size of the equations. There are several ways to do this, but the best and easiest is to have already saved a MathType Preference File for the font and size that you wish to use in SMART Notebook. (We won't go into Preference Files in detail here. If you're not familiar with Preference Files, refer to Chapter 7 in the MathType User Manual.) In Word, select MathType > Format Equations. In this case, our Preference File is named "Times+Symbol 24.eqp". (When you click Browse, MathType will open the Preferences folder, and you can select the one you want.) Click OK, and MathType will convert all the equations in the document to Times New Roman, 24pt, which matches our text.

2. Before we export the equations as GIFs, we need to set our GIF preferences in MathType. Double-click any equation in the document to open MathType. We're not going to edit the equation, just change our preferences.
3. In MathType's Preferences menu, click on Web and GIF Preferences.
4. Leave all the defaults set exactly as they are, but check the box that's labeled Smooth edges (anti-aliasing). Click OK, then close MathType.

5. Select the Export Equations command from Word's MathType menu.
6. In the Export Equations dialog, make sure these items are set before you click OK:
   1. Folder name. This is important, because this is where all the equation images will go. You'll need to find them when it's time to place them into the SMART Notebook. You can put the equations into an existing folder, or you can make up a folder name that doesn't exist yet. If the folder doesn't exist, MathType will create it for you.
   2. File type. Must be set to "Graphics Interchange Format (*.gif)". None of the other choices will import acceptably into the Notebook.
   3. Replace equation with file name. You'll see the value of this shortly.
   4. If you have any text or graphics selected in the Word document, make sure Whole document is selected in the Export Equations dialog. If there is nothing selected in Word, Whole document will be the only choice in the Range section, as shown in the screen shot below (don't click OK yet):

7. Just a note on the File name pattern before we go on. The default is Eqn###. What that means is that your equation files will be named consecutively, beginning with "Eqn001.gif". Each pound sign (#) represents a digit. You'll notice the screen shot above only has 2 pound signs present, so there will be only two digits in the equation number (notice the screen shot following item #8 below). You can change this name to suit your needs. For example, our document is titled advanced-algebra-practice.doc, so if we want our equation GIFs to have similar file names, we could change the file name pattern to be something like this: adv-alg-p##. Just make sure you have enough pound signs to number all your files. We only had 14 equations in our sample document, so 2 digits were plenty. MathType only allows 12 characters in the file name, and this is why we didn't use "adv-alg-pract##".

8. After you click OK and MathType finishes converting the equations to GIF images, you'll see something like this:

9. Click "OK". Notice the equations have been replaced with the file name of each equation—Eqn01.gif, etc. These are the file names you'll be looking for in the folder where you told MathType to save the GIFs in step 2 above.
10. Select the entire document again (Edit > Select All, or Ctrl+A).
11. Copy the selection (Edit > Copy, or Ctrl+C).
12. Switch to a blank SMART Notebook, and paste your document into the Notebook
    (Edit > Paste, or Ctrl+V). Now your Word document is contained in a new textbox in the Notebook. You could have done this with the equations still showing in the Word document—i.e., before you converted them to GIFs—but only the text of the document would have been pasted into the Notebook. Doing it the way we did it gave us a convenient way to know where each equation belongs.
13. In the SMART Notebook, select Insert > Picture File. Navigate to the folder containing your equation GIFs, and double-click on the first one (Eqn01.gif in this example). You'll need to manually place it where it belongs in the document, then double-click the text box and delete the file name (<<Eqn01.gif>>). You'll also need to add enough spaces to move any text that follows the equation, which in this example is a question mark. (SMART Notebook does not allow you to "wrap" text and graphics, the way Word does. This is why you need to manually add spaces to make room for the equation.)
14. This is how the question will look when projected:

Inserting equations into Notebooks created from scratch

In this section, we assume you are familiar with creating a new Notebook in the SMART Board Software, so the discussion begins at the point where you have created a blank Notebook and have saved it on your computer. It's not necessary to save it at this point, but it's good operating practice to save new documents whenever you create them, and continue to save them often during the editing process.

1. Click the Text icon on the SMART Notebook toolbar to begin your document.
2. Type the question. We'll use the same question in the example above. The above example is formatted with Times New Roman 24pt font. For this one we'll use Arial 24pt.
3. Open MathType (Start > All Programs > MathType 5 > MathType). Be sure to open MathType from the Start menu, and not from Word.
4. Create the equation in MathType, remembering to change the Style and Size
   (Style > Define & Size > Define) to Arial 24pt.
5. Select the entire equation (remember the shortcut -- Ctrl+A), then copy (Ctrl+C).
6. Paste the equation into the Notebook (Ctrl+V), and move it to the proper position.
7. This is how the question will look:

8. No doubt you notice a problem right away. Although the text in the Notebook is set to 24pt, and the MathType size is set to 24pt, the 2 sizes are not the same. Since MathType 24pt equations exactly match 24pt text in both Word and PowerPoint, we must assume that SMART Notebook incorrectly renders the text at a size other than what you specify. If you double-click the text box and change the size of the font to 28pt, it will more closely match the size of the equation:

9. The sizes don't match perfectly, but SMART Notebook doesn't allow you to specify a particular point size. A better match would be 32pt, but there aren't any choices between 28pt and 36pt. If you want the sizes to match better than that, one option is to adjust the size in MathType, since MathType lets you set any size you want. For this particular example, try a MathType Full size setting of 22pt, keeping the Notebook text at 28pt.

Importing a PowerPoint presentation into a SMART Notebook

At first glance, it would seem that importing a PowerPoint presentation into a SMART Notebook would be easier than importing a Word document, if for no other reason than that there's actually a menu item in SMART Notebook specifically for the purpose of importing PowerPoint presentations. Judge for yourself. Here's a screen shot of a PowerPoint presentation with 24pt text and a 24pt MathType equation:

Here's what the same bullet and equation look like after using the Import command in SMART Notebook:

Notice when importing PowerPoint slides, SMART Notebook has the same problem with text size as we noticed above (i.e., it's smaller than 24pt). In addition to the text, the quality of the equation is very poor, especially when compared to what we saw above when converting the equations from Word to Notebook. Realizing these limitations, we can't recommend using the Import command in SMART Notebook to convert a PowerPoint slide into a Notebook page. Instead, we recommend following these steps, which are similar to the steps above for Word documents:

1. On your PowerPoint slide, Shift+Click the bullet placeholder. If you just click on it, it will place the cursor inside the placeholder for you to edit the text. We want to select the actual placeholder, including all the text inside. The quickest way to do that is to hold down the Shift key while clicking the left mouse button. NOTE: The only indication that the placeholder is selected will be a border around it. The text inside won't be "reverse highlighted" as it would be if you selected only the text.

When the placeholder is selected, you'll see this...	...not this

2. Copy the placeholder (Ctrl+C).
3. Switch to SMART Notebook and paste the placeholder onto the Notebook (Ctrl+V). The placeholder will paste as a graphic, not as editable text. If you need to edit the text, you'll have to do that in PowerPoint, then repeat the copy/paste process.
4. Switch back to PowerPoint and double-click the equation you want to copy to the Notebook. There is no way in PowerPoint to do this export procedure with a single command as we did in Word.
5. When you double-click the equation, it opens in MathType. As above, we want anti-aliasing to be checked, so click on Preferences > Web and GIF Preferences, and make sure there's a checkmark next to "Smooth edges (anti-aliasing)".
6. Select the equation (Ctrl+A), then copy it.
7. Switch back to SMART Notebook, and paste it in. Move it to the proper location. Our example looks like this:

8. Much better! You can get even better text quality by copying the text of each bullet individually, then pasting it into the Notebook as text.

We hope this tutorial has been useful to you. If you'd like to see similar tutorials, or if you have comments or questions about this one, please let us know.