Usage

How to use iMath

The best way to learn how to use iMath is to look at the iMath-tour.odt document corresponding to your version of iMath in this folder.

iMath Options

The behaviour of iMath can be changed by setting options. There are three ways of doing this

1. Globally for all documents
2. Specifically for one document
3. Specifically for one formula line

Global Options

The global iMath options are accessed through the standard Office dialog Extras-Options. They appear under the section Writer.

• Include files
  • Include init.imath: This should always be marked unless you know exactly what you are doing. It reads important definitions of built-in iMath functions
  • Include units.imath: This file needs to be included if you intend working with units other than the standard SI units (Newton, Pascal, etc.)
  • Include substitutions.imath: This file contains a small library of mainly trigonometric substitutions. See the iMath-tour document for a usage example
  • Include further files: Here you can specify your own files that might contain definitions which you want to have available in all your iMath documents
• Formatting
  • Units: Here you can specify a list of units separated by ';' which should be used for printing physical quantities. If no such list is specified, the SI base units are used. A useful list of units for mechanical engineering might be {%mm; %N; %Nm; %Nosqmm}. The order in which the units are specified is important! Simple units should be specified first, more complex ones later on. The reason is that the complex units usually imply the simpler ones, for example, N implies mm because 1 N equals 1 kg m/s^2.

Document-specific options

The document-specific options are accessed through document properties File-Properties-User defined properties. Note that because of a bug in Office, a new document does not show any user-defined properties until it has been saved and re-opened once.

=== Formula-specific options

The formula-specific options can be accessed through the context menu (this is the preferred way) or by editing the formula text (see Reference#Options for details).