equation editor

I'm looking for a good open source (read:free) math editor; any suggestions? I found MathCast, but I want something better.

not sure what youre talking about, but ive heard of something called Latex that might be related!

If you want to do homework and all that, try this.  Get OpenOffice, and whenever you want an equation, hit alt, i, o, f.  It's easy to type that keystoke combo quickly, and the OpenOffice formula editor is very flexible.  So far I haven't found anything that it can't do for homework, except for graphics.  For those, you'll need to use Photoshop or something (obviously).

umm...  downlaod a crack version of mupad and scientific workplace, MuPad and Scientific workplace are build on LaTeX, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX , if you're a tech savvy, maybe you can play around with LaTeX and get somewhere yourself, i'm not a tech savvy so i wouldn't know.

The two programs work integrated with eachother and can be used for writing scientific documents easily (Scientific workplace haivng a "word-like" interface, and writing in math vs text works by clicking a button (similar to MathCAD if you're familiar with that)). They can also display graphs, 3d and 2d, which honestly looks pretty nifty.

but if you're strict on it being open source, then i can't help you, maybe see if there is some smaller project based on LaTeX somewhere? since LaTeX seems to be the preferred coding-stuff for this kind of thing.

LaTeX wins.  Its fonts and text density management are better than the average office suite, as well.  You may want to steer clear if you're doing it for someone who's going to nit pick formatting, though, because it takes some expertise to match most of idiotic custom formatting people out there mandate.

LyX + MikTex if you're doing stuff on Windows. Just be prepared to be bitch slapped a lot by LyX whenever you want to do things your way.

TeX is easy to get things sort-of like you want them to look; fucking difficult to get just like.

>>7

That's because getting it just like you want is usually stupid.  Most people aren't professional typesetter and therefore what most people want has nothing to do with what's easier/better to read.

>>1
As everyone has been saying, use LaTeX.

The easiest way to get started is to grab a TeX distribution and a bare-bones IDE. For Windows, get MikTeX and TexnicCenter; for Linux, get TeXLive and Kile. These are all free and open source.

Here is the ultimate beginner's guide to LaTeX. Save it on your hard drive and refer to it whenever you need to look something up:

ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/info/beginlatex/src/old/beginlatex.a4.pdf