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maria_rowenas22710785
New Participant
March 4, 2019
Answered

MathTools plug-in and Conditional Text

  • March 4, 2019
  • 4 replies
  • 2768 views

I work at a publishing company. One of the challenges is having a student edition version with teacher answers. A solution we've been using is creating teacher answers on a separate layer. However, alignment issues and spacing issues always appear. In the past, I worked with another publishing company that used conditional text. It's cleaner and easier to use. However, when I attempted to use this approach, I noticed it does not work with the plug-in, MathTools. Any conditional text that has MathTools styles applied either crashed the program when turning on/off the condition or reverted back to (Unconditional). Is there any way MathTools can be utilized with the Conditional Text feature in InDesign? Help, please!

    Correct answer Michael Bullo

    I have no experience with MathTools so I'm just thinking laterally here. You'll often see people anchoring images to text and controlling the image anchor with conditional text. This is a sneaky way of applying conditional settings to a whole image frame. The same can be done with text frames. While this may complicate your design I'm wondering if putting everything that you need to apply MathTools formatting to in a separate frame which is in turn controlled by conditional text might side-step the problem.

    4 replies

    MarceloMoreira
    MarceloMoreira
    New Participant
    June 8, 2020

    Thanks to this post I´ve discover MathTools and I´m back here to alert about their infamous license system. After install the plugin if you need to move it to another machine (in case o upgrade, by example) it can only be done paying a 40 euro fee additional to the montly license you already pay. I´ve never heard about something like this and get me surprise (unfortunatelly after aquisition). This information is not clear on their site an it´s the reason a came here to make it clear to everyone who intent to purchanse it.

      S
      Schwörer, Ferdinand
      Participating Frequently
      March 5, 2019

      Hello, Maria, this is Ferdinand from movemen.

      Can you please share the version of MathTools and InDesign you are using?

      You shouldn't see crashes with current versions of MathTools. If you do, I really like to reproduce and fix it.

      Here's the intentionally brief story why MathTools currently won't support Conditional Text within MathZones (equations).

      Conditional Text may produce unexpected (and sometimes even largely undetected) side-effects due to the way it works: 

      Turning off a condition effectively cuts related text ranges out of the story.

      For instance, applying a condition to a text range containing all but the last character of a Hyperlink will eliminate all but the last character from the Hyperlink source, after turning the condition off and back on. Use the Hyperlink panel to verify this: only the last character will be part of the Hyperlink.

      MathTools MathZones would be affected in a very similar way:

      MathTools represents MathZones as sequences of text characters. Those characters carry a payload which MathTools uses to protect the MathZone infrastructure as you modify the equation. You can type into the numerator of a fraction, for example, but you can't delete the characters representing the fraction bar. The same MathZone protection mechanism prevents you from applying a condition to parts of a MathZone to avoid corruption when turning off the condition.

      Does that make sense?

      


      Thanks,


      Ferdinand

      hammer0909
      hammer0909
      Inspiring
      March 5, 2019

      Now that's what I call service! Maria, you are now connected to Ferdinand who is a very talented developer and overall awesome guy! Share your info with him so he can address your problem. Cheers Ferdinand!

      S
      Schwörer, Ferdinand
      Participating Frequently
      March 5, 2019

      Cheers, Chad!

      P
      Peter Kahrel
      Braniac
      March 5, 2019

      Maria -- Why not contact the MathTools developer? movemen - Contact

      P.

      S
      Schwörer, Ferdinand
      Participating Frequently
      March 5, 2019

      Thanks, Peter, for the heads-up!

      Michael Bullo
      Michael BulloCorrect answer
      Participating Frequently
      March 4, 2019

      I have no experience with MathTools so I'm just thinking laterally here. You'll often see people anchoring images to text and controlling the image anchor with conditional text. This is a sneaky way of applying conditional settings to a whole image frame. The same can be done with text frames. While this may complicate your design I'm wondering if putting everything that you need to apply MathTools formatting to in a separate frame which is in turn controlled by conditional text might side-step the problem.

      M
      maria_rowenas22710785Author
      New Participant
      March 5, 2019

      Thanks so much, Michael! You're awesome. I don't know why I didn't think of this. I used this solution before with another math plug-in. It works. I just needed someone like you to remind me about this work-around.

      Michael Bullo
      Michael Bullo
      Participating Frequently
      March 6, 2019

      Hey that's great Maria. Happy it works.

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