Equations look bad when adding effects

Question

So I guess that whenever I add any sort of effect to my equations written in equation editor 3.0 they get converted in some other format( I think) with a large loss in quality in presentation mode. I saw that this doesn't actually happen in the 2010 version. What can I do?

Answer 1

They're not converted to another format. Notice you can still double-click them and open them in Equation Editor. The problem (which was totally the fault of PowerPoint, and has been corrected in PowerPoint 2010 as you noticed) is the animation. Try an equation on a slide without any animation at all on the slide -- no animated text, no animated objects at all. Then try one with animation. You'll see the equation on the slide with animation is "pixilated" and not as smooth-looking as the equation on the slide without animation. Couple of work-arounds to this. One, you can simulate animations by building multiple slides with successively more information on each one. Clearly this will simulate the look of animation only with "appear" animations, such as appear, dissolve, fade, etc. It will not work with "movement" animations, such as fly from right, zoom from center, etc.

The second work-around is to use MathType to save the equations as high-resolution GIFs, which are not pixilated the same way by the animation.

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Bob Mathews

Design Science, Inc.

Twitter: @afwings, @MathType

Answer 2

Thank you, using multiple slides is probably the only thing I can do until I upgrade. It's really annoying since some times even removing the animation for the particular equation didn't correct things. I didn't actually know that that was correlated to the rest of animations on the slide. Thanks again for the suggestion.

Answer 3

I forgot to mention that a critical piece of my "workaround #1" above is to apply a slide transition to the slides you want to animate (or all of them -- your choice). I typically use an animation style of dissolve, so a slide transition of dissolve would simulate, and is practically indistinguishable from, a dissolve animation.

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Bob Mathews

Design Science, Inc.

Twitter: @afwings, @MathType

Answer 4

Just simple stuff like entry effects (box, blinds, etc.), nothing fancy. As soon as I do it the edges appear pixelated but there's no distortion. If I get rid of the effects they look fine. again.

Answer 5

What kind of effects are you trying to add in equation editor?

How do they show in the presentation mode, are they distored?