The Settings Screen

You can set the working settings to suite your needs. This section explains about the settings that appear in the Settings Screen and about a few settings that don’t.

After you select your settings, press “Set” to apply and save them.

Clipboard Copy Format

MathCast uses an image format to copy equations. There are 2 formats: Bitmap copy and Enhanced Metafile copy. MathCast uses a “screen-copy”, what’s rendered on the screen is what is copied to the clipboard.

Use the Bitmap copy, if you know the document is for on-screen reading or for a webpage. With Bitmap copy the equation would look exactly as it does in the Edit Screen. Bitmap copy however is not sharp enough for high quality printing.

Use the Enhanced Metafile copy if you want to create a document with sharp equations for printing. In order to get more detail, MathCast first enlarges an equation, then copies it. If an equation is too large and doesn't fit in MathCast's window, you’ll have to maximize the window, in order to have it copy correctly. There are two types of copy: the first pastes in nicely in Word 2000, WordPad, and OpenOffice.org Writer, while the second pastes better in Word XP, Word 2003 and newer.

Use MathML copy if you want to copy the MathML generated by MathCast. This copy format must be selected in order to copy equations between different instances of MathCast on the same computer.

XML Layout

MathCast gives you some control over the output of the MathML it produces.

Named – MathML characters are replaced by their name (for example the character “π” is replaced with “π”).
Hexadecimal – MathML characters are replaced with XML standard hexadecimal notation (for example the character “π” is replaced with “π”).
Unicode – MathML characters are left as Unicode characters (“π” remains “π”).

If Unicode is selected, MathCast will save files with "UTF-16" encoding type, otherwise it will save in ASCII format.

Display Types

MathCast supports two display types for equations: “Block” and “Inline”.

Textbooks usually use “Block” when centering equations, like this:
The Schrodinger equation states that:

Where the m stands for…

And they use “Inline” when writing an equation in the middle of a sentence, like this:
The Schrodinger equation, , is one of the fundamental equations in Quantum Physics…

Notice the differences in the parenthesis size and in the size of some of the characters.

Math Styles

You can set the default size, color and background color for your equations.

At the current version, MathCast supports only the basic colors.

Font Smoothing Type

You can set the level of smoothing or antialiasing for equations. This setting will also affect the default font smoothing setting for all other running applications, until MathCast is closed.

None: The equations will be drawn with only one color.
Standard: The equations will be smoothed with "grayscale" colors.
ClearType: The equations will be smoothed with RGB colors. This option can only be selected in Windows XP or newer.

Equations with smoothing, will take slightly more space on the hard drive, when exported to picture files.

Enable HTTP Server

MathCast allows people to work together on equation lists over a network and across the Internet. This feature is described more in detail in the section labeled Downloading Equation Lists.

To enable this feature check the checkbox, then choose the port number for incomming connections, click on "set", and restart MathCast for the settings to take effect.

Additional Settings

These options can be set by editing with notepad the “MathCast 0.9 Settings.xml” file. The file is located in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\MathCast" on Windows 2000 and XP.

You can customize the colors MathCast uses to draw the Edit Screen by changing their hexadecimal color codes:

tableColor - the blue table where all the equations are drawn into.
selectionBoxColor - the pink box that surrounds the selected equation.