It is no secret that the equation editor in OpenOffice sucks (well, there are a few folks out there that think it is great, but not many). The equation editor in MS Office is pretty awful, too, for that matter. What I always wanted was an equation editor of OpenOffice that used Latex as the backend. Then, I found it, and boy is it awesome: Ekee – developed by Ronan Le Hy in France (don’t you love open-source?)
Basically it let’s you type in latex equations into the entry box which it compiles on fly. When your equation is done, you can then drag and drop it into right into OpenOffice Impress or onto your desktop to save the equation as png. You can also export the equation to pdf or svg format through the menu at the top with one click.
What if you find a mistake in one of your old equations? Since it is in a .png format, aren’t you screwed? Nope, the killer feature of ekee, is that you can drag the .png back into the ekee window and then continue editing from where you left off.
If you ever need to put equations in presentations/posters/documents, check out ekee.
