Fractions

[Lou Wrench]

Hi Geniuses
I have to make up a Financial Management text book and it is full of formulas/fractions with either a number or text over a horizontal line with a number or text below folowed by an equals sign and a result verticaly centred on the formula/fraction, has anybody got an eligant way of making formulas/fractions?
Lou

[eugenetyson]

Tables is a good option here.

If you wanted to have:

A x B/100 = Result

I would enter (where "\t" equals a tab character)

A x \t B = \t Result
\t100 \t

Then select the text and covert it to a table.

Then you can merge A with the cell below it and any others and align all your cells vertically.

If you want you can load in excel sheets as tables, by placing, and the tables will be done, but you will have to merge the approriate cells to get the vertical alignment correct. You will of course have to stroke the apropriate parts of the cells to create the line between the B and 100 to signify a divide by.

[GuyB]

Hi Lou,

If you have a lot of complex fractions or even complex equations to deal with, you should take a look at MathType at :

http://www.dessci.com/en/

It's the tool for what you need and it's 97.00 $. There is a trial version to download.
This is what they say on the site for the trial version :

«You will have 30 days in which to enjoy all of the features of MathType. If you do not purchase MathType within 30 days, it will become MathType Lite. This is exactly like Equation Editor, with the bonus of MathType's fonts and symbols, which you may use with our compliments.»

Also, there is an equation editor in Word that might fill your needs.

Besides the fractions formatting that is available in ID with OpenType fonts (from what you say, I don't think that is what you need), I don't know of any plug-ins or script that can do that directly in ID.

[Lou Wrench]

Eugene, thanks, that is pretty much what i have been doing. But these formula are built into a descriptive or explanitory text and the "table" method gets cumbersome.
And thanks Guy I have downloaded MathType and give it a go in the morning
Lou

[Paul C]

There are fonts that have fractions in them - Helvetica Open Type from the Adobe library has a couple of fraction fonts - so does Neutra from House.

pbc

[eugenetyson]

Eugene, thanks, that is pretty much what i have been doing. But these formula are built into a descriptive or explanitory text and the "table" method gets cumbersome.
And thanks Guy I have downloaded MathType and give it a go in the morning
Lou

Lou, I pretty much have the same thing to do with books on taxation. There are a million formulas to deal with.

Personally, I find the table method the best as it flows with the text. I have never used or bought any third party software that InDesign can do, simply because it's pointless, from my perspective.

I typeset and publish over 30 books on taxation each year and I find that this is quite easy to do as regards the table method.

Out of curiousity, what is it you find cumbersome about using tables?

[Lou Wrench]

Hi Eugene
Your point was well taken! I do not find tables, per se, as cumbersome (I think they rock, for lots of uses, even as tables) but the environment in which I am working on in this particular job, makes that method a bit awkward. What I have done is made a little text box with two lines of text, centred, with an underline between the two, put it in the library, and copy and paste into the appropriate place, and change the text to suite.
Lou

[eugenetyson]

Hey Lou,

That's fair enough, I was just curious as I know I don't have all the answers :D and it is interesting to know how others approach a problem.

Thanks,
Eugene

[Paul C]

Glyph palette from Illustrator - font: Helvetica LT STD Fractions:

pbc

[The Repro Kid]

Lou, I'm not sure I'd call this elegant, but I like to set up stuff like this without using any line tools, if possible. This is done with two lines of text, each as a separate paragraph. Three tabs, one Rule Below Paragraph and one Rule Above paragraph. The plus sign is baseline shifted down from the first line.

My example doesn't show the = sign followed by the result. That would just be another tab on the first line, baseline shifted the same as the + sign, and the offsets on rules would be different because of the longer text box.

[Lou Wrench]

Hi repro
That is pretty much how I am doing it! Excepy that I am using text underline, I make up the formula in its own text box with solid leading to keep it tight, then cut and past that text box into the body of copy.
Remember Venturer 10-15 years ago you could type into a special window (like story editor)
A+B+C over The Speed of Light
and hey presto it was done.

[eugenetyson]

Ah Ventura, what a load of crap that program is, well it has some useful things and it is good for typesetting, but man it is unstable.

Repro, your way of working the text is nice, although the rule above and below is hard to work with especially if you have to add to the sum and this causes an increase in the line width which would have to be changed manually.

What I like about the tables is that you do get total control over height and width of each part of the sum. I also use tables to make flow charts in InDesign.


http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/4094/tablesforequationsqr7.jpg http://img370.imageshack.us/img370/7237/simpleflowchartii7.jpg

EDIT: I shoud have really centered the text vertically for this example, but it's easily done by merging the appropriate cells and selecting the align from the control panel.

[Lou Wrench]

Eugene
like I said tables rock! I think I should have stayed with it a bit longer.
The problem was that these formula were supplied in MS word as tables, but only rows and no columns but with tabs instead, so I got fed up of trying to make someone elses crap work and tried a different tack. There is another hundred pages to go so if the same sort of stuff comes up again I will persevere, you stuff looks good
Lou

[The Repro Kid]

...Repro, your way of working the text is nice, although the rule above and below is hard to work with especially if you have to add to the sum and this causes an increase in the line width which would have to be changed manually....EDIT: I shoud have really centered the text vertically for this example, but it's easily done by merging the appropriate cells and selecting the align from the control panel.Your edit is exactly what I was thinking when I looked at your example. I would have to merge those two cells to edit the text between the two divisors or it just wouldn't be right.

And I also don't know where your line between the divisibles is coming from. Do you need to draw it in? I don't like drawing in the lines, they too need to be adjusted whenever anything changes, and it's a bitch to select them and they can be dropped or shifted by accident. Are they underscored text? Underscores never look right and you can't vary the distance between lines or the underscore will be uneven. The rules above and below are no problem for me. They are very easy to select and control, and cannot be dropped or shifted. If you are used to working with rules below and above it is very easy to adjust their lengths, weight and color, and you don't have to mouse all over town in order to switch tools back and forth. You don't even have to select anything, just make sure your cursor is inserted somewhere in the correct paragraph. You might want to try getting more familiar with Rules Below and Above, it is can be a nice way to add an understated touch of professionalism to many typesetting situations.

[edit]But if i had to set large amounts of formulas like the way you are, I would look into that $97 dollar MathType GuyB pointed out. It would save gallons of hours of unnecessary work. And at $97, it's a real bargain compared to the ones you used to have to buy for Quark, which cost two to three times as much.

Oh yes, one more thing, there is a free option. There is one of those open source Unix programs that is a typesetting/layout program, and I believe it sets formulas. I can't remember it's name but it's fairly well known and popular. I downloaded it once to try it out. I think it might need one of those X11 GUI interface for Unix open source programs on MacX, but maybe not.

[eugenetyson]

Repro, because I'm working with tables here, I don't need to draw any line. All the tables have cells and you can different weights on all sides of the cell stroke. So I start off with 0pt stroke on all the cells, then I select the sum that needs a line beneath it. After that I would select the bottom stroke of the cell (visible on the control panel at the top, tripple click one of the lines to deselect all of them, then click on the bottom line) and select a stroke of 0.5 pt.

Now all I have to do is have the correct width for the column. If I select the column to the left of the sum (if the line is too wide) I can shift click on the line and move it without moving the rest of the table, whereas if you just click it and drag it the other cells in the table move.

The $97 dollar plugin sounds amazing, but InDesign does a fine job for me at the moment and I don't see any need to get a plugin just yet. And because I am working a lot of tables I do have shortcuts set up, by editing the Keyboard shortcuts, to vertically align, center and for cell styles (CS3).


You can see with the flow chart that I had to split the cells to create the lines going between the cells. You can split the cells horizontally or vertically and this divides them exactly in two, so you know your line is always going to be bang in the middle of the cell your leading to and from. It's just a matter of applying the stroke weight to the cell side that is needed.

I'm well aware that Illustrator can do these too and InDesign can do this with individual text boxes that are anchored, but for other reasons that does not work well for us as the books go to the web which is a whole different issue.

[Lou Wrench]

I looked (quickly) at MathType and it doesn't appear to work in InDesign, so it becomes an imported object, which is problematic to edit.
I used text underline and shifted it up to where I like it, and you can make a character style. This will still hold good for tables. Do you make multiple tables as you go down the page for different formula? and how do you get the text in the table to look the same leading as the bits of body in between these tables?
Lou

[GuyB]

MathType creates all kinds of formulas very easily. It's not an ID plug-in. You have to save your "formulas" as .eps (or .pict for Mac, or GIF) then place them as inline graphics in ID.

As for editing those formulas, it's the same than editing any other picture while placed in ID : option-double click on the picture and MathType will open.

[eugenetyson]

I do make multiple tables for each sum, as tables become a problem across pages, but not that big of a problem. The reason I do make multiple tables for each sum (which you don't have to) is that I can choose to keep one sum on a page together or split the sum over a page(s), which is quite difficult with text boxes, unless you link them across pages, then you have to anchor them etc.

It really does come down to personal preference. With tables you can keep rows together too, by going into the cell options and it's in the third tab (I can't remember the name).

The text in cells works the same as text as regards leading. Distance between cells can be adjusted by including a space in the cell to the left, right, top or bottom.

This is what I like about tables, cells are like mini text boxes that are all connected, although you can't flow text through cells. But not only is like mini text boxes, all the cells can have independent attributes for strokes, spacing, colour, et al, top, bottom, left and right of the cell. And not only are they like little text boxes, they increase and decrease in height automatically (unless you select the height to be EXACT). So there's not really any need to go in and resize a text box or anything, the table adjusts itself to the correct height.

After all that you can still select an attribute that is independent of the cells and the spacing given between cells. You can give a space above and below the table too which will give you space between your body text so your table doesn't crowd your text.

Don't forget if you have a lot of tables that are similar you can make a table and make cell styles in CS3 that will speed up your work further.

Eugene

[Lou Wrench]

Eugene
Therein lies another query! I tried the (was it Teacup or something) TableStyles and it seemed great! I have tried CS3's table styles, and as yey do not seem to work well with imported text, and the cell styles seems to work only if you hold down the Option key, which then over rides you font styles (bold, italic, dingbats, etc.)
With the new styles we should be able to zip through tables, and make some wonderful styles, have I misesd something?
Lou

[eugenetyson]

There a couple of things you could try.

When importing the text, select the show options when placing the text, then select unformatted tables (there a few options here).

You could try and map the styles from whatever application you are importing from to the styles in your indesign file.

What you may need to do is make a set of paragraph styles specifically for tables.

But this is all I do with my text when I have a table to format.

I set the space above and below the cells as 1mm. Good space for me. Then I rule up where needed. If there are rules between the columns I always put a space of 2mm right and left of the cell (goes for cells that have a stroke all around too).

Then I select the table (when in the table press Esc), then I just change the font to Book Antiqua (I don't choose a style because this will change all the bold and italic back to Regular (if I choose regular but I don't pick any), then I just change the font size to either 9 or 10 pt and that's it. I align numbers to the right and currency symbols to the center. It takes about 20 seconds for me to do each table.

I don't have table styles or cell styles set up, I just haven't got around to it. I actually tell a lie, I made the styles for one book to try them out but haven't implemented them to the others yet, but I will. But the thing is, that when you import text to InDesign from Word (or another source) that even if you have the same styles in InDesign, InDesign will preserve the local formating from Word. Meaning that if Word has a style named Heading and your InDesign file has a style named Heading, then it will use the style Heading. But if the Heading is made bold in word without updating the style in word to include the Bold then InDesign preserves the local formatting, so you have to override the local formatting in InDesign.

The thing is you have to clean up your word files styles to import them properly to InDesign. It's a bit of a pain and I do honestly just want InDesign to use the styles I made and not preserve the formatting from Word, but it doesn't work that way.

Hope that clears that up.

[webnprintguy]

Here's a workaround that might help:

http://fractionfonts.com