Jex - A Java Equation Editor for Open Office

Release Notes

current 1.64: To use this version you need the command line switch --legacy. It fixes numerous errors that have crept in over the years - basically the program no longer worked. This is the first version of JeX that will be ready for real work - without the --legacy option it will work with the texMaths engine developed by Roland Baudin to insert good looking TeX in SVG format. This requires a patch to texMaths - if Roland incorporates it into his mainline it will be available by installing texMaths; if not I will release a patched version of texMaths - this will be sorted out over the next few weeks. The new version also simplifies various options and will automatically deal with conf files and start in server mode unless the "--noserver" switch is used, so that it can be run simply by java -jar jex.jar. New documentation will be prepared as soon as we establish how the interaction with texMaths will take place. [Posted at 01/01/2013 04:51 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.56: Source code update eliminating dependence of main classes on awt to ease porting to other platforms such as android. [Posted at 05/16/2010 04:42 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.55: Tested with Openoffice 3.1. Added support for equations generated from Google documents. Modified the behavior of fences and embellishments to prevent the entering of invalid constructs. Added instructions for displaying fonts correctly in Ubuntu. [Posted at 05/14/2010 10:44 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.46: Openoffice 3.0 update. Fixes the mathtype converter to work properly with Openoffice 3.0; adds robustness checking so when an entire document is exported to TeX and an error is encountered the program won't stop. Fixes a problem with the mathtype converter when levels are highlighted. Updates the installation instructions to remind the user that they must enable macros before using the install program. [Posted at 12/30/2008 11:06 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.45: Be warned: Sun's Java 6 release is very buggy. It will kill printing under Linux entirely. They also broke the way the control keys work. This release provides a fix (workaround). [Posted at 03/04/2007 10:07 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.44: Fixes to solve some installation problems. Trying to "Install for Office" as root leads to a non-working installation on Unix due to permissions problems and a bug in Openoffice. Jex now checks and if you are running as root refuses to do the installation and directs you to rerun the program not as root. Second, by default, Jex closes very slowly to avoid timing problems when it closes before OpenOffice does. This means that if you are running Jex as root, close Openoffice, and run Openoffice not as root, then hit ctrl-m most likely Jex is still running as root. To fix this, any of the install options implies that Jex will exit immediately when all windows are closed, and in addition a new install option "Immediate Shutdown" can be used to force Jex to exit immediately when all windows are closed. [Posted at 07/29/2006 11:18 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.42: Improves placement and visibility of overbars and other embellishments in the wmf file exported to openoffice. [Posted at 07/15/2006 01:55 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.37: Fixes the varphi character in the Euclid binding - it had appeared as "4". Thanks to Ernst Spiess for helping track this down. Adds the greekItalic option if you want your lower case greek letters to appear as Italic. The default is mathItalic=true greekItalic=false which is as close to TeX as is possible. [Posted at 11/20/2005 07:41 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.35: Added user control over font bindings. This can be done only by editing the conf.jex file. You must use the new version to save to create the new options. Possible font bindings are esstix symbol euclid ooeuclid opensymbol and jopensymbol. You can use different bindings for java (editBinding=) and for openoffice (printBinding=). You must have the relevant fonts installed for this to work. You may also vary the font face used for ordinary latin symbols using editFace= and printFace= (any truetype font on your system should work, not necessarily well). In addition you can set mathItalic=false if you want to use non-italic latin symbols. [Posted at 11/19/2005 11:19 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.34: Improves import of TeX files using latex2html, and further expands the TeX interpreter. Fixes a problem with the installation of the ctrl-m keyboard accelerator under windows - thanks to Daniel Schockett for identifying the error. [Posted at 11/03/2005 09:28 AM by David K. Levine ]

stable 0.12: Same as current 1.30. [Posted at 10/30/2005 03:57 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.30: Fixes a bug in the TeX interpreter with sup/superscripts following fences. [Posted at 10/30/2005 01:32 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.29: Fixes the destruction of long equations by latex2html. Entire Document operations can now be cancelled. Adds TeX support for \prime. [Posted at 10/30/2005 08:56 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.27: For systems with latex2html installed adds the ability to import TeX documents. [Posted at 10/29/2005 05:08 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.26: The current view options are now stored in the configuration file; it is no longer necessary to use the "Set As Default" option which has been removed. [Posted at 10/29/2005 05:00 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.25: Improved robustness of graphics/equation insertion routines. Fixes problem inserting equations into bulleted or numbered text. [Posted at 10/19/2005 08:38 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.24: Fixes a bug in the TeX compiler when using embellishments with sub/superscripts. Tries to handle footnotes inserted by latex2html in a sensible way when doing Embed All Graphics. [Posted at 10/18/2005 07:32 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.23: Adds the "Embed All Graphics" command. Same as "Update All Equations" except that unrecognized graphics objects that are links to external files have the files inserted into the document to make it self-contained. Useful for converting documents produced by latex2html. [Posted at 10/18/2005 03:30 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.22: Improvements to update all equations: displaymath now converted correctly; unrecognized graphics are now left alone rather than being converted to gibberish. [Posted at 10/18/2005 08:14 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.17: Extended the TeX parser to recognize \ast and \frac{}{}. [Posted at 10/17/2005 06:12 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.16: Adds support for mathtype spaces. [Posted at 10/15/2005 11:14 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.14: Adds the ability to update all equations in a document (for example, if they were imported from mathtype or TeX, or the document font size has changed). [Posted at 10/15/2005 09:59 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.12: Fixes a bug with the insertion of an edited equation when the cursor is positioned before the object being edited. Allows replacement of mathtype equations without having to select the object. A word of advice on Linux: use the native menus - using the Gnome menus seems to make openoffice unstable in RC2. [Posted at 10/14/2005 10:00 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.10: Fixes a bug in the creation of metafiles for insertion into openoffice on platforms that use multi-byte character encoding such as UTF-8. There is a related bug in the way that openoffice 2.0 rc2 displays symbols in windows metafiles used by Jex and by Mathtype on some platforms - it uses the platform character encoding. On Linux you can check by running locale charmap from the console. If the result is not ISO-8859-1, for example it is UTF-8, equations will not display correctly. You can fix this by starting openoffice from a shell or shell script by setting the language appropriately: LANG=en_US; openoffice.org-2.0 -writer [Posted at 10/13/2005 11:42 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.09: Cursor problem in fixed spacing fixed. Stability fixed. [Posted at 10/13/2005 09:34 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.08: Stability problem resolved?? It appears to have been a timing problem caused by the Jex window closing causing a reconnect to OO while OO was still writing the document. Another problem: the cursor is in the wrong place after inserting an equation with fixed line spacing. Don't yet know how to fix this - probably an old problem. [Posted at 10/12/2005 11:35 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.07: Small fixes to the mathtype interpreter and TeX generator. Improvements to the file handling and GUI for exporting TeX documents - there is now a dialog box to indicate progress. If you add/edit your jex configuration file and set jex.xml=path/to/a/file then writer2latex will use path/to/a/file as its configuration file rather than the default configuration file. The support zip file now contains a jex.xml file which is a suggested configuration file for writer2latex - it includes definitions of the macros produced by Jex. [Posted at 10/12/2005 10:42 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.05: Adds the ability to export entire .odt documents to LaTeX. Use File|Export TeX Document in Jex. This uses the writer2latex libraries, so with an existing installation you should download the support zip and extract the additional libraries. Note that as a step of the process the document will be saved in the old .sxw format and some formatting from .odt may be lost. Note also that mathtype equations will be converted along with Jex equations, equations created by latex2html and OO equations. This works, but needs refinement. [Posted at 10/11/2005 10:07 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.04: Adds the ability to edit equations produced by latex2html using the -nomath -html_version 2.0 options. After opening your html file in openoffice, you should edit|select all and copy the text to a new text document. You can then edit equations in this new document. After the equation had been edited, the ugly looking latex2html bitmap graphic will be replaced by a nicer looking .wmf graphic stored in the .odt file rather than as an external link. [Posted at 10/11/2005 05:36 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 1.02: Support for mathtype embellishments, matrices and stacked equations. [Posted at 10/09/2005 11:30 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.99: Fixes bugs in the mathtype interpretation: generally these bugs caused the interpreter to quit before the equation or a subpart was finished. [Posted at 10/08/2005 07:33 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.96: Support for mathtype fences and fractions. Fixes some bugs in the mathtype interpreter. [Posted at 10/08/2005 05:20 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.95: Fixes the problem that mathtype equations didn't load the first time Jex was invoked using ctrl-m. [Posted at 10/08/2005 12:42 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.94: Support for mathtype large operators such as sums and integrals. [Posted at 10/08/2005 11:05 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.93: Support for mathtype sub/superscripts. [Posted at 10/04/2005 04:51 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.92: Preliminary support for reading mathtype equations embedded in openoffice documents. Open a word document with mathtype equations. Save it as .odt. If you click on a mathtype equation and hit ctrl-m Jex will attempt to read it and open a Jex window with the equation in it. [Note the first time you do this it seems to fail, but it should work properly on the second and subsequent attempts.] When you save the Jex equation it will replace the mathtype equation with the corresponding Jex object. Note that there is no support for templates yet, so you are limited to a string of characters on a single line. [Posted at 10/02/2005 06:47 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.88: WARNING: Jex is not stable with RC1. When placing equations it randomly causes OO to crash. Most likely an OO bug, perhaps fixed with later releases, but beware and save your work. [Posted at 10/01/2005 06:11 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.88: Placement of parentheses was again hopelessly broken - perhaps OO 2.0 renders linear transformations in metafiles differently than OO 1.0? Fixed. [Posted at 10/01/2005 06:10 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.87: First version for OO 2.0 exclusively. In OO 2.0 it is no longer necessary to put equations in a box that is has the same height above and below the baseline. The vertical placement has been changed - this version should work in a sensible way with variable spaced lines; it should no longer be necessary to use fixed line spacing to get sensible looking results. Warning: the RC1 version of OO 2.0 is not completely stable and it sometimes crashes moving the equation to the correct location. [Posted at 10/01/2005 01:46 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.86: Fixes a bug where an edited equation was not deleted after the new equation was added. [Posted at 10/01/2005 10:13 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.85 stable 0.9: Last versions for Openoffice 1.1; subsequent development aimed at Openoffice 2.0. Last public domain version; subsequent releases under the GPL. [Posted at 10/01/2005 09:35 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.85: When using oo 2.0 you must use the .jar files in http://www.dklevine.com/general/software/jex/support2.zip and not the .jar files in support.zip. This resolves the instability problem mentioned in the previous post. [Posted at 09/30/2005 05:56 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.85: Updates installation instructions for OO 2.0. Jex is not stable under OO 2.0 and crashes OO. [Posted at 09/30/2005 02:21 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.85: Fixes alignment of arrows over boxes in OO. Adds padding so that you can see overbars in display. [Posted at 05/18/2005 11:19 AM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.84: Fixes alignment of fences around tall matrices in both the display and in OO. [Posted at 05/17/2005 07:42 PM by David K. Levine ]

current 0.83: Puts the "grab" command back on the file menu. If an equation is selected in openoffice and you "grab" it is imported into Jex and you can edit it and use "ctrl-m" to put the edited version back in the document. This is equivalent to selecting the equation and hitting "ctrl-m" in openoffice, which is more efficient and will start Jex if it isn't already running. But the macro facility is broken in the beta version of openoffice 2.0. However, you can use Jex with beta oo 2.0 if you run Jex from the command line or by clicking on the jar file, and use the grab command instead of ctrl-m to retrieve equations for editing. (In other words: Jex can still control beta oo 2.0, it is just that beta oo 2.0 can no longer run a shell script or connect to a socket which is what it needs to do to start Jex and tell Jex to grab an equation.) [Posted at 05/16/2005 06:25 PM by David K. Levine ]

currrent 0.82: Fixes a bug placing equation other than at the end of a paragraph; folds in improvements of Gilles Menard - fixes the omega and vertical placement of the arrow. [Posted at 05/16/2005 10:29 AM by David K. Levine ]