Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 52620
improvement for writing derivatives / derivations (add prime, double-prime & triple-prime to opensymbol)
Last modified: 2013-08-07 14:55:07 UTC
You cannot write proper derivation with the formula editor. Writing first, second and third derivation should look like f′ and f″ and f‴, which will be like f' and f'' and f''' but without space, if you use a suitable font. The characters after f are prime (U+2032), second prime (U+2033) and third prime (U+2033). OpenSymbol has non of the characters and StarSymbol only (U+2033). You need this character because the apostroph is not long enough to look proper for the first derivation. The second derivation needs two strokes close to each other. But " is no workaround, because it is delimiter for text. For the third derivation there is no workaround at all. So now you have to find a suitable font and define your own symbols. I would like to have at least the three primes in the OpenSymbol-font and best would be, if they could be inserted direct as attributes and not as named symbols via %. Please have a look at http://www.ooowiki.de/FormeleditorMathematikAnalysisDifferentialrechnung. The text is in German but the pictures under heading "Ableitung" show you the difficulties.
OS to ALL, extending summary, confirming, reassigning & setting keywords. (derivation: the process - derivative: the result)
Besides, it's impossible to use a prime sign on the top right with an index on the bottom right, so that the prime sign is just on top of the index and now to the right or the left (at least there is no straight forward solution). E. g. I need to write an epsilon with index r and one or two prime signs. In LaTeχ this works with $$\varepsilon_r^{\prime\prime}$$. In OOo you can define the single, double and triple prime e. g. as %prime, %pprime and %ppprime in Extras - Katalog (German), probably Tools - Catalogue in English) and try the following workarounds, which all look quite ugly. %varepsilon_r%pprime newline %% prime to far to the right %varepsilon_r^%pprime newline %% prime to small %varepsilon_r^ size *2 %pprime newline %% prime to far to the top Though for most OOo users and developpers this may appear to be a minor problem, please consider that flaws like this keep people from using OOo for scientific documents. It would be especially bad if someone starts writing a thesis or so in OOo and after a while notices that OOo isn't capable of such basic things. It's really not an exotic feature for physicists and mathematicians.
In the MS Word (Equation editor) there is possibility to write primed symbols with indexes. Developers, you can look on it for inspiration.
This is a real stopper making it impossible for me to use OO even if I wanted and.