COMPARISON

This page provides a comparison of Radical Pie with classic MathType 7 and the Office Math equation editor built into Microsoft Word.

Equation Typesetting

Feature	Radical Pie	MathType	Office Math
Brackets	Yes	Yes	Yes
Supports arbitrary number of bracket components	Yes	No	Yes
Arbitrarily stretchable bracket symbols	Parentheses Brackets Braces Angle brackets Vertical bar Floor Ceiling Double brackets Double angle brackets Double vertical bar	Parentheses Brackets Braces Angle brackets Vertical bar Floor Ceiling Double brackets Double vertical bar	Parentheses Brackets Braces Vertical bar Floor Ceiling Double vertical bar
Stacked accents	Yes	Yes	Yes
Subscripts and superscripts	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fractions	Yes	Yes	Yes
Binomial coefficients	Yes	No	Yes
Radicals	Yes	Yes	Yes
Quotients (long division)	Yes	Yes	No
Iterations (large summations, products, etc.)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Can use any character as iteration symbol	Yes	No	No
Can add special modifier group to iterations	Yes	No	No
Integrals	Yes	Yes	Yes
Integrals can be stretched arbitrarily	Yes	No Integrals can’t be stretched at all.	No Integral sizes are limited to pre-built glyphs in the font, and integrals can’t stretch beyond the largest one.
Integral slant angle can be adjusted	Yes Integrals are generated dynamically, not taken from a font.	No Integrals are taken from a font and can’t be modified.	No Integrals are taken from a font and can’t be modified.
Matrices	Yes	Yes	Yes

Feature	Radical Pie	MathType	Office Math
Stretchable (wide) accent marks	Yes	Yes	Yes
Supported wide accent marks above an expression	Line Double line Hat Check Smile Frown Tilde Right arrow Left arrow Double arrow Right harpoon Left harpoon Double harpoon Bracket Brace	Line Double line Hat Frown Tilde Right arrow Left arrow Double arrow Right harpoon Bracket Brace	Line Double line Hat Check Smile Tilde Right arrow Left arrow Double arrow Right harpoon Left harpoon Brace
Supported wide accent marks below an expression	Line Double line Hat Check Smile Frown Tilde Right arrow Left arrow Double arrow Right harpoon Left harpoon Double harpoon Bracket Brace	Line Double line Right arrow Left arrow Double arrow Right harpoon Bracket Brace	Line Brace
All wide accent marks can be stretched arbitrarily	Yes	Yes	No Only straight lines and arrows can stretch arbitrarily.
All wide accent marks can have labels	Yes	No Only brackets and braces can have labels.	No Only braces can have labels.
Stretchable arrows	Yes Read more about the arrow building features.	Yes	Yes
Can have labels above and below arrows simultaneously	Yes	Yes	No
Arrow labels can be aligned center, left, or right	Yes	No	No
Can specify stack of arrows with long or short length and center, left, or right alignment	Yes	No	No
Can specify multiple symbols appearing on left, right, and center along each arrow	Yes	No	No
Alignment markers for multi-line equations	Yes Supports left, right, and center alignment for each partition.	Yes Right alignment only.	Yes Limited to one aligner per line. Right alignment only.
Supports phantoms for advanced alignment	Yes	No	Yes Not accessible through GUI.

Drawing and Annotations

Feature	Radical Pie	MathType	Office Math
Lines and shapes can be attached to anchor points in an equation	Yes	No	No
Annotations containing arbitrary expressions can be attached to drawing objects	Yes	No	No
Drawings and annotations can be attached to other drawings and annotations to arbitrary depth	Yes	No	No
Drawings and annotations update positions dynamically as an equation is edited	Yes	No	No

Fonts and Characters

Feature	Radical Pie	MathType	Office Math
Equations can use any font	Yes	Yes	No Only fonts containing a MATH table can be used in equations. This limits you to Cambria, STIX Math, and a handful of specialized fonts that can be found on the internet.
Supports all Unicode characters	Yes	No Only characters belonging to the basic multilingual plane (BMP) can be used in an equation.	Yes
Emoji can be used in equations	Yes	No Most emoji characters have values outside the BMP.	Yes
Supports kerning, ligatures, and combining marks in general text	Yes	No	Yes
In Microsoft Word, automatically sets equation font size to match surrounding text	Yes	No	Yes

Interoperability

Feature	Radical Pie	MathType	Office Math
Cleanly copies and pastes to other applications	Yes All graphics are outlined to avoid compatibility problems.	No There are problems with bad spacing and some fonts not showing up at all.	No Severe problems with fonts, spacing, and clipping paths make copy and paste completely unusable.
Can embed equations in documents through OLE	Yes	Yes	N/A
Can convert Office Math equations	Yes	No	N/A
Supported file formats	PIE (native format) SVG PDF EMF	WMF EPS GIF	None Equations cannot be saved as standalone files.

Usability

Feature	Radical Pie	MathType	Office Math
Number of configurable size and spacing parameters	335	40	Zero Size and spacing is hard-coded in the font’s MATH table. You can’t change it.
Automatically detects standard function names	Yes	Yes	Yes
User can define new standard function names	Yes	Yes	Yes
Recognizes TEX symbol names	Yes Recognizes 496 different symbols.	Yes	Yes
All features available without requiring code of some kind	Yes	Yes	No