Overview

MathFlow allows you to control the font face, weight and slant of individual characters or entire subexpressions. This is accomplished by applying named styles. MathML defines 12 generic named styles that can be used. MathFlow also allows you to create and manage custom, user-defined styles as well. At the markup level, both MathML and custom styles are represented by attributes. Only the style names appear in the markup, not the literal font, weight and slant information. Thus, style information can easily be reprocessed via the use of XSLT transformations to produce style commands appropriate for a specific composition engine.

To quickly apply a style to an expression, select the expression and use the mini-toolbar drop-down list of styles to select the desired style.

This will wrap the chosen expression with an mstyle element, making the style sticky, as explained in the Working with MathML Properties section. The working font style (i.e., the current default), can be quickly determined by looking at the drop-down list of font styles in the minitoolbar.

Alternatively, styles can be applied to characters and expressions from the Font Properties dialog. To apply a style, select the expression to be styled, and open the Font Properties dialog from the Properties menu. Select a style by using the radio buttons to activate either the predefined MathML styles drop-down or the custom styles drop-down, and pick your style from the drop-down list.

At the bottom of the Font Properties dialog are two checkboxes that determine whether the property settings will be sticky or not.

• If "Apply to each token element in the selection" is chosen, the style is set on each individual character within the selection, and it will stick with them if you cut part of the expression and paste it elsewhere.
• By contrast, if you choose "Set as default for selected expression", the MathFlow Editor will insert a style change template as needed, and set the style once for the entire selection. In this case, the style is associated with the entire expression and not the individual characters within it. Consequently, new characters added inside the expression will inherit that style, and characters cut from the expression and pasted elsewhere will lose the style.

As noted above, only the style names are stored in the MathML markup. The associations with particular fonts and properties are maintained separately by the system. See the Programmer Documentation section later in the main documentation for more details on this and related topics.