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EquationSVGEditor

EquationSVGEditor 2 is released. With this free software you can create your own math equations for videoscribe. It supports Latex commands, making it straightforward to import a *.tex file and write it to (multiple) svg file(s). 

It took me half a year spare time to get this Latex in, as there are many symbols, and many ways to get things on the screen.

As it is a windows based program, the OSX users can not use it directly, which is regretful. The program was written in Delphi Tokyo, and if any of you have the ability to port Delphi Vcl to Delphi Firemonkey (via Mida) let me know, as in that case I think the porting to OSX is not too difficult.

You can download the program from: 

EquationEditorSVG home page

In the zip file you'll find the program and some files to read, such as the manual.

Have Fun.


1 person has this question

Thanks Otto for making this software available to the VideoScribe community.


Disclaimer: We like this software, and it has performed well during ordinary use, but we have not undertaken any in-depth testing and we have not checked it for the presence of malware or any potentially harmful behaviour, so you download and use it at your own risk and we do not accept any liability for any loss or damage it may cause.



HI Otto, 


Thank you for the efforts in including a latex maths to svg tool for videoscribe. Many of us you use VS for teaching technical topics have been frustrated by the lack of such builtin functionality.


I look forward to testing EquationSVGEditor 2. 


However, the google drive link appears not to be working!




The link is working! My browser had being blocking the popup.


Have just down loaded the zip folder.


Will get time to test this next week. 

Looking forward to your feedback, I expected some issues as latex has many options and it is difficult to know if I got most of them covered.

The inclusion of latex maths in the equation editor is working great - well done! 


As a user, I really like the fact that we can type (or indeed paste) latex code directly into the editor or simply import a latex file.


I performed a few initial tests and the resulting svg equations are importing and animating fine in videoscribe. The entire process took less than a minute. I was using long multi-line equations and the animated strokes are very natural.


Since I started using videoscibe almost 3 years ago, I have been waiting in hope for such a feature where technical maths could be animated in videos. Up to now, the workaround of having to manual trace strokes atop of equation images was pushing me away from videoscribe to the point where I was about to let my subscription lapse and switch to the old fashioned camera above paper approach.


Hence, I hope videoscribe send you plaudits for your efforts in bringing this important functionality which will bring subsequent subscriber revenues from the likes of this university lecturer :)


 




At the moment I am running the equation editor and indeed videoscribe on a Linux operating system.

I am also a Mac user so I would second your suggestion to port to OSX.

A minor issue here with using large denominators in equations:

image

While small denominators look fine, there are alignment issues with larger content as per the second example above.


Not a major issue though.


I have installed your EquationSVG editor on a Mac using the WineBottler app. The basic functionality i have tested so far is all fine. So perhaps porting the software to OSX is no longer necessary! 


 

image

I had a good look in the source and changed it a bit, so the alignment should be better now.

image

I changed the drawing of the = sign, to make it more in agreement with the - and+ sign. 

You can download the new version. 

EquationSVGEditor 2 is perfect to give a correct path for equation compatible to videoscribe.  However, important problem is how to use the Latin modern font which is standard for most of the paper. Would you please teach me on it? Thank you so much

The difficulty with fonts is that you have stroke fonts (so some curved lines making up the font) and outline fonts (a double outline with  a filling inside). With a real pen you can draw stroke fonts, but outline fonts are much harder. So you understand that it is not straight forward to get an outline drawn nicely in videoscribe. Have a look when you import  a font like Latin modern in videoscribe, and see how some text is actually drawn. I did discover some possibilties to get this solved and am adding this to the next version. I do hope to finish that coding in a couple of months, asmy full time payed work is demanding at this stage in the corona time. If you want the current version equationSVGEditor to use this latin modern font, you need to define this yourself in the font editor part. It means that you have to redraw each character (like I made all the other characters). If you really want to do this let me know at my gmail address.

I've just downloaded v201 and it couldn't run on Win10 20H2 (program couldn't start at all) and also Virtual WinXP (memory access violation). Is there any additional DLL file needed?


Hi Kevin,

That is new to me. I assume that you unpacked the zip file, and started the program. That should  work, it creates a file called "Equation.cfg", in which some settings are stored (I stopped using the registry for that several years ago). If you are not allowed to write in the directory of the executable, it will return an error, but the program should still run. As you put the program in some directory,  it is very unlikely that you can not write in that directory. I wrote the program in Delphi version Tokyo and used no additional DLL's in v201. The windows dll are used e.g. for file open/close, but that is done by most programs.  The only thing that I can image is that some anti virus program likes to behave smart. As it is an unknown program for any virus checker it might decide to block it, even without warning you. I had that on my new laptop (two months old). The virus checker raises a remark and I had to wait some time before the program started (in that time I assume the virus checker looks at the behavior of the program and it can discover hijack software in that way). As that was not doable during programming I turned that option of.  Still you should get some response, so I don't think that is the case.

That it is not working in a virtual winxp is also eluding me. EquationSVGEditoris a 32 bit program and there is noting really special in memory usage. So no clue on that yet.

Could you use e.g. wetransfer and send me the zip file you downloaded? Use my gmail account, you can find in the readme file. In that way I can see if something is wrong/different from what I have. Still I don't expect to find anything in that way.

Hi Otto Bergsma,


Thank you very much for your detailed follow-up.


I've just tried again on my home PC (Win10 20H2), and surprisingly (to me) the program starts normally. 

There must be something wrong with the PC at the office, but not because of anti-virus software (because the office PC doesn't have any anti-virus software and even Microsoft Defender was disabled).  I'll restart the office PC tomorrow and try again, maybe Windows installed some updates and it's pending to restart.


Sorry for triggering the false report.


Regards & Stay safe,

Kelvin


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