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

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 ...

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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Microsoft 365 Modern Comments

July 26th, 2022
The new Modern Comments facility aims to give a similar commenting experience on the web and in native apps. On the desktop in Windows and the Mac, the editor component is RichEdit. The facility is a work in progress, and it is getting very nice. This post gives some background on incorporating RichEdit into the Microsoft 365 commenting ...

RichEdit Autoformatting

June 29th, 2022
RichEdit and Word have had the most elaborate autoformatting ever since Office 2007, namely math formula auto-buildup. A UnicodeMath expression builds up into OfficeMath as soon as it is unambiguous. Word and other programs have also had less ambitious autoformatting since late in the last century. Such functionality includes auto conversion ...
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Rounded Rectangles and Ellipses

May 22nd, 2022
In Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and RichEdit, you can enclose text in a rectangle by putting the text into a math “boxed formula” object. To try this out, type alt+= to enter a math zone and then \rect(a+b)<space>. This displays as as The “\rect(a+b)” is the UnicodeMath representation of this boxed formula. In MathML, the boxed ...
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