Formulae: a huge pain

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foreigner
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Jun 19, 2016 2:15 am

Formulae: a huge pain

Post by foreigner »

Hi,

I often create physics concept maps which contain lots of formulae. From all diagram and mapping software I chose CmapTools because it seems to be the ONLY one with some kind of included formulae support.

However, using it is an absolute pain. Some examples:
- no keyboard-based way to enter math
- horrible representation
- lots of workarounds needed: For example, apparently you can't write sub- or superscripts and break line with enter. It messes up everything (check out yourself). An ugly way around this is writing everything in vectors or matrices, where the number of rows/columns has to be known beforehand as there seems to be no way to add or delete them once created.
- In my version (CmapTools 6.01.01, Windows 10), the text cursor is mostly invisible in formulae, making it very hard to edit them. Also, positioning this invisible cursor by mouse and double click is incredibly imprecise, it ends up anywhere in the formula.
- Small thing, still driving me crazy: If I'm writing text, change to another window to look something up and come back to CmapTools to continue, the text cursor is still blinking at the position where I left, but it's not activated. Happens to me all the time that I just continue to type again and nothing happens, which drives me absolutely mad every time (maybe more than it should).

Also, at some rare times instead of the formula their internal representations are displayed. Seems like a bug, saving and restarting the program usually does the trick. But what quite bothers me: This internal representation looks A LOT like LaTeX. Is it really so hard to implement decent LaTeX support?

This question may not be appreciated on this forum, but I'm sure you'll understand:
Is there an alternative concept map software with better support for formulae? I love CmapTools for everything not containing formulae, but I really need something different for my math and physics concepts.

Thanks in advance.
cmapadmin
Site Admin
Posts: 797
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 2:22 pm

Re: Formulae: a huge pain

Post by cmapadmin »

Sorry you are having problems with the formula editor. We'll look into the bugs you report.
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