Murray Sargent

Math Accessibility Trees

March 29th, 2021

This post discusses aspects of making mathematical equations accessible to blind people. Equations that are simple typographically, such as 𝐸 = 𝑚𝑐², are accessible with the use of standard left and right arrow key navigation and with each variable and two-dimensional construct being spoken or felt when the insertion point is moved to...

Some UnicodeMath Enhancements

February 15th, 2021

In the years since UnicodeMath 3.1 was published, some improvements have been made. The converter that converts UnicodeMath to OfficeMath also converts LaTeX and Nemeth math braille to OfficeMath. The converter needs ways to provide OfficeMath math-object arguments even when these arguments are not marked as such in the math format. The ...

RichEdit Emoticon Shortcuts

January 27th, 2021

Seems many email messages and IM’s include emoji smiley faces like 😊. You just type :-) and you get 😉 whether you want it or not! About a year ago, the Microsoft 365 RichEdit started offering such a facility. This post describes the built-in emoticon shortcut strings and the corresponding emoji characters and the APIs for enabling the ...

RichEdit Hot Keys

January 17th, 2021

In the early microcomputer days, MS-DOS editors like pmate and teco depended on hot keys for navigation and other tasks. With the great support for the mouse, touch, and graphical interface aids like ribbons incorporated into later personal computers, the need for navigation hot keys was greatly diminished. But there are other hot keys that ...

MathML and OMML User Selection Attributes

December 26th, 2020

Some assistive technology (AT) programs use MathML or OMML as conduits for generating math speech and braille from math-enabled apps. In addition, they would like to use these formats for editing math text as well as speaking it and displaying it on refreshable braille displays. To this end, the formats need selection attributes that identify ...

Displaying Enlarged Images in Popup Window

November 29th, 2020

RichEdit clients may want to zoom images that the user clicks on. To satisfy this need, the Microsoft 365 version of RichEdit supports the EN_IMAGE notification, which notifies the RichEdit client when the mouse moves over an image or the image is clicked on. The client can then display an enlarged image in a new window by sending the RichEdit...

RichEditD2D Window Controls

November 1st, 2020

This post is for desktop programmers who use RichEdit window controls in their applications and would like to have more display functionality. Examples of such controls include the desktop Outlook To, Cc, and Subject lines as well as WinForms RichTextBox controls, WordPad, and myriad other programs. It’s easy to create a RichEdit window ...

MathML mfenced element deprecated on web

October 25th, 2020

The MathML working group is planning to deprecate the <mfenced> element as well as the <mo> fence and separator attributes for use on the web. The justification is to simplify web implementations by deprecating MathML features that are redundant. This post explains how <mfenced> and the fence and separator attributes can be ...

How I got into technical word processing

October 18th, 2020

This post is an update of an early post that doesn't appear to be archived. It tells a bit of how I started in technical word processing back in the middle of the last century. More precisely it was in 1965 that I started using a nifty (for that time) vector plotting program by Grey Freeman at the Yale Computer Center. I was a Yale grad ...

Unicode Math Calligraphic Alphabets

October 1st, 2020

The Unicode Standard needs to encode regular and bold math calligraphic/chancery alphabets as well as regular and bold and fancy-script/roundhand alphabets, since chancery and roundhand alphabets are used contrastively by some authors and [La]TeX can support both kinds of letters. In most documents, chancery and roundhand styles can be ...