OpenOffice Math

[worker201]

Help! How do I get the square root symbol into an equation using OpenOffice Writer?

I'm currently using Arial, but I'll take the symbol in any font I can get.

(I have to explain the Great Circle equation from the Perl script for the project paper)

[worker201]

Well, apparently, you don't. I downloaded a bunch of mathematical fonts, including the ones Donald Knuth designed for LaTEX, but none of them were useful for a word processor. The multiple lines of a complex equation seem to be well outside the scope of a word processor's capabilities.

Supposedly LaTEX can do it, but I didn't have time to learn LaTEX, so I whipped these up in a graphics program:


and inserted them into my document as graphics.

As you can see, these equations are kinda difficult to reproduce in a word processor. Still, if anyone can figure out how to do it, please let me know. It would be nice information to have for next time.

Humorous footnote: it took longer to produce these equations on paper than it did to write and run the Perl code that uses them. Computers win again!