Murray Sargent

Principal Software Engineer, CXE (Office Shared)

Yale BS, MS, PhD in theoretical physics. Worked 22 years in laser theory & applications first at Bell Labs and then Professor of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona. Worked on technical word processing, writing the first math display program (1969) and the technical word processor PS (1980s). Developed the SST debugger we used to get Windows 2.0 running in protected mode thereby eliminating the 640KB DOS barrier (1988). Have more than 100 refereed publications, 3 laser-physics books, 4 PC books, 163 posts on Math in Office blog. Joined Microsoft Research in 1992. Since 1994 have been in Microsoft Office working mostly on RichEdit and OfficeMath. Member of Unicode Technical Committee (1994—) and MathML Working Group (1999—).

Post by this author

It’s been so fine!

April 6th, 2023
TL;DR I’m 51₁₆ long past the usual retirement age. So, after more than 30 years working with super talented, fun people at the best software company in the world, I’m retiring from Microsoft 😊. Stephen Chua now owns Math in Office. It all started in 1988 when I had a summer job getting Microsoft’s CodeView debugger running in ...

Math Dictation

April 5th, 2023
You can dictate faster than you can write or type it, so math dictation can be handy for anyone working with math, notably on mobile devices. It can also make math more accessible. Math speech is similar to UnicodeMath, which you can use to enter equations into Word, PowerPoint, and other apps. Accordingly, we translate English math speech as...
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ITextDocument2 SetProperty and GetProperty

March 26th, 2023
These methods allow programmers to set and get document properties for RichEdit controls. There is some documentation on the web, but more detail can be helpful and new properties have been added. This post describes the current set of properties except for the math properties, which are described in the post Default Document Math Properties...
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Displaying Math in WordPress

February 27th, 2023
The Microsoft devblogs are hosted by WordPress. Until recently, we haven’t been able to display equations using traditional math typography in our blogs except in images. Now we can embed LaTeX math which is a lot more accessible. One syntax for this is [ℒ]…[/ℒ], where the “…” has the desired LaTeX and the ℒ is the literal ...
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Math Speech Strings and Localization

January 28th, 2023
This post describes how OfficeMath speech is localized into multiple (~18) languages. The facility doesn’t handle all Unicode math symbols or all math notations. But it handles the most common symbols and notations. There are two tables that need to be translated into the supported languages: a Unicode math symbol speech table and a math ...

Using RichEdit for Text Processing

December 31st, 2022
Suppose you’re writing a program that needs to process rich text. You could write your own functions. Alternatively, you could have RichEdit do the processing. For example, you might want to search for mathematical expressions in an RTF or HTML file or convert text in one math format to another format. Or change the kind of list numbering. ...

Default Math Properties

November 29th, 2022
Quite a few math properties have document default values. These default values are used if you don’t override them, which you can do usually by invoking a math context-menu option or programmatically by calling the ITextDocument2::SetProperty or ITextDocument2::SetMathProperties methods. Most properties pertain to “displayed” math zones...
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RichEdit Hyperlinks

October 29th, 2022
RichEdit has two kinds of hyperlinks: automatic hyperlinks (autoURLs) and friendly-name hyperlinks. As its name suggests, the autoURL is automatically recognized by RichEdit as a hyperlink and is displayed as a URL. A friendly name hyperlink has a name, which is displayed, and a hidden instruction part that contains the URL. This post ...

Setting and Getting Text in Various Formats

September 29th, 2022
You can get and set text from/into RichEdit in a variety of formats including RTF, HTML, MathML, OMML, UnicodeMath, Nemeth Braille, and speech. This post documents RichEdit options for a general way to access text using ITextRange2::SetText2(options, bstr) and ITextRange2::GetText2(options, pbstr). As such, this post is for programmers. All ...

Computers I have known

August 29th, 2022
A friend recommended that since I got into computers a long time ago, I should post about how computers have changed over the years. Well, here goes a trip down memory lane! Analog and button pushing The first computer I ever used was an Electronics Associates analog computer at the Perkin Elmer Corporation where I worked as an intern in the...
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