Microsoft Equation Editor math font hack

Thanks to a very nice blog commenter, I now know that there is a nice little work-around if you desperately want an equation in a certain font. I’m not sure it’s what I would always want to do, but if you really, really need a particular font, this will work (for a powerpoint or for a poster or some other one-off application).

There’s been a lot of discussion about getting the new Equation Editor to render in different fonts. I love the new equation editor, but I agree that it’s a pain that Microsoft only has one “math font.” (Cambria Math)

Here’s how it works: The following were all produced by creating an equation in the normal way, then selecting the whole equation and changing its format to “Normal Text” (on the Equation Tab). Once you do this, you can go back to the home tab and change the font of the whole equation. Obviously not every symbol will render correctly if that font doesn’t have certain glyphs, but I was surprised how well these rendered.

And here’s sample output (download docx or pdf here):

sample math fonts

8 thoughts on “Microsoft Equation Editor math font hack

  1. This works for chaning the font. However, if you want variables to print in italics in the new font, you have to manually re-italicize them. I wish there was a way of converting an equation to “normal text” without losing the italics.

  2. Pingback: Looking back on 299 random walks | Random Walks

  3. I second the hero status! After many fruitless searches for this exact topic, I have an answer and a way to change my equations to any font! …And it is so easy! AMAZING!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s