A guide to Microsoft Office's equation editor

At the bottom of the screenshot, I share with you Richard’s finest example of nested switches, but forgive me if I don’t explain it. Finally, if this gives you a yearning for more, Microsoft provides more information here.

Ligatures
Despite the best efforts of type designers, certain letter pairs look awkward in print and on the screen. The most obvious example are fi and fl. It’s particularly noticeable in serif typefaces – those with cross strokes at the ends of the main strokes, such as Times.

Although it’s barely noticeable when reading body text, it is obvious at larger sizes. The top of the letter f collides with the top of the l or the dot over the i.

For this reason, traditional typesetting uses ligatures – a pair of specially designed letters combined in one piece of type. More to the point, you can use ligatures in any word processor that supports Unicode.

One way is to use the Windows Character Map – this works in any Unicode-compatible application, including Wordpad. Don’t worry too much about the font­ – you can change this later ­ but it must be a font that contains the ligatures. Not all do, but Times New Roman does and is the default choice when you start the Character Map.

Tick the Advanced View box and make sure that Unicode is selected in the Character Set box, and in the Group By box select Unicode Subrange. This will open a second window with a list of ranges. Choose the last, Private Use Characters, and you should see the fi and fl ligatures.

The location seems to vary with the font. Times New Roman has them at FB01 and FB02 but some other fonts have them at F001 and F002. Choose the ligature you want, click Select, then click Copy.

This will put the ligature on the clipboard and you can paste it in to a document. A better way is to type your text normally then use the search and replace feature to look for fi ­ in the Replace box, paste the copied ligature.

In Word you can use the built-in character map with Insert, Symbol. Make sure Unicode is selected in the ‘from:’ box, and choose Private Use Area in the ‘Subset:’ box. A bonus here is that in Word 2003 there’s a ‘recently used’ set, so you don’t have to hunt the next time.