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

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 ...

Math in Office 2006—2019 Listing

September 24th, 2020
This post gives links and brief introductions to my MSDN Math in Office blog posts. Some of the posts aren’t archived and don’t have links. They might be the subjects of future posts. Contents Math Autocomplete. 6 Math Zone Navigation. 6 Using MathML-Based Speech to Edit Math in Different Math Models. 7 Using Math ...

Math in Office 2020—

September 24th, 2020
My MSDN Math in Office blog posts (2006—2019) have been archived since June, 2019 and the blog was retired. Welcome to the new home for Math in Office! There’s lots of news about both the RichEdit editor and OfficeMath, so exciting posts are forthcoming. To start things off, OfficeMath is enabled in the RichEdit housed in the Windows 10...