Community Expert

Question

Equation editor for FrameMaker?

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
January 10, 2026
3 replies
209 views

I have a project with a mathbook for a customer right now which has investigate equations in FM. I was not aware that MathML had ceased to be maintained and it seems FM's own builtin editor is not entirely up to date either. Are there any alternatives? What do other people do?

frameexpert

Community Expert

Do you do any work with InDesign? I see that InDesign 2026 now has math equation support, including the ability to import equations from Word. It might be worth looking into.

www.frameexpert.com

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FrameMaker-dk

Author

Community Expert

Thank you for the suggestion @frameexpert Will look into it.

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

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Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Hi Bjørn,

I have only few middle size equations, and I use the built-in equations editor. Works for me.

Best regards, Winfried

F

FrameMaker-dk

Author

Community Expert

Yes, the builtin editor works for me as well. I just never fully understood the limitations, but it is probably something to do with limited Unicode support. Hopefully Adobe will address these issues sometimes.

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

Anyone who has recent experience with equations in FM might need to know if this is structured or un.

If already working in XML, importing a .mml object from another app strikes me as a path.

If the contents don't need to be referenced within FM, importing as PDF, SVG (perhaps with outlined text) is a possibility. EPS still works, but might be incompatible with output format intents.

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FrameMaker-dk

Author

Community Expert

Thanks @Bob_Niland . This is unstructured. I suppose the builtin editor will do the job, but I am not really aware under what circumstances it will NOT work. As I understand it FrameMaker should be able to choose between math fonts, but I am only able to see Symbol, even if I have Cambria Math installed as well. But I.... think... this has something to do with Cambria Math being a sort of "extension font". Or something...

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

Bjørn: …not really aware under what circumstances it will NOT work.

A minor dependency is that I seem to recall that there is at least one modern equation construct that FM's legacy eq editor can't do.

The main dependency is the output workflow. In unstruc FM, I was just playing with native FM eq, SVG import (from an external MML editor), and PDF import. I could not get mml/ODF Objects to import.

To print & PDF, any of the above can produce scalable high quality (as would EPS).
SVG is going to have its usual challenges with fonts. If eq content doesn't need to be text-selectable, outline before saving to SVG.

To HTML, SVG gets passed thru intact. But FMeq & PDF get converted to raster (PNG in my tests, and I'd expect EPS to act similarly). These rasters scale coarsely, if at all, in browsers.

If there's a single-source/multiple-outputs solution for equations in FM, I haven't worked it out.

The MathML issue is Tracker FRMAKER-11189.
Unicode should work in FM eq, subject to the limitations of FM on Unicode generally (FRMAKER-10976). FM support for Unicode is now down to 37% of the populated code points. For example, if you need anything from Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (Unicode block U+1D400–U+1D7FF), FM cannot render them today.

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