ADDING SPECIAL CHARACTERS TO YOUR EQUATIONS OR LABELS

Graphmatica supports a number of Unicode code points for mathematical operators not found on standard keyboards. You can also use superscript numerals as exponents, and Greek letters and subscript numerals when definining constants. Finally, you are free to copy and paste any character you like from the operating system's character map into your equation comments, graph labels, and annotations.

The Special Characters item in the Edit menu brings up a virtual keyboard with two rows devoted to the Greek alphabet, one row full of mathematical symbols, and one row of numerals. Use the Shift button at the bottom-right of the window to switch between lowercase/uppercase Greek letters, and subscript/superscript numerals. Hold the mouse pointer over a button to see a tooltip indicating the name of the character it represents.

You can enter special characters in the equation editor, Annotations dialog box, Labels pane of the Graph Document settings, and Functions and Constants dialog box. Pressing one of the buttons in the Special Characters tool window will insert that character into the text box that currently has focus (or the equation editor when no dialog box is open).

The Special Characters item in the Edit menu brings up the standard OS X Special Characters dialog box to help you find characters of interest. Search for "Greek" to see the Greek letters, "superscript" to find numbers to use as exponents, or "subscript" to find the subscript numerals. Keep in mind that you can add frequently-used characters to the Favorites category so it's not necessary to search for them repeatedly.

Note that not all fonts contain glyphs for every special character available in the Unicode standard, or even the subset of those characters used by Graphmatica. Both Windows and Mac OS X will attempt to substitute a different font for characters that are not available in the selected font, but this font might not be a great visual match. In the worst-case scenario, you might see a square box in place of a character that is not supported in the font you have chosen for a particular element of the display. For best results when using many special characters, select a font like Lucida Sans Unicode which includes glyphs for a broad range of characters.

Keep in mind that graph documents including special characters may not be readable by older versions of Graphmatica. Unsupported characters in labels and comments will simply be replaced by ?, but unsupported characters in equations will result in graphing errors. Version 2.1 supports a small set of special characters for mathematical operations and superscripts. Encourage people you share documents with to upgrade to version 2.2 to gain support for the full complement of superscripts, subscripts, operators, and Greek letters.