Purpose of medium shade unicode character in Word 2010 equation ed

[LynchburgRecord]

I tried asking about this before but I really wasn't specific enough. Please
see the screen shot url below:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_4Fz7Um3aXFY/S6kQVJpdZwI/AAAAAAAAARU/1T14idbS1Is/s800/equation1.JPG

The Unicode medium shade character in the Microsoft Word 2010 Equation
Editor seems to have the effect of making the integral sign larger. I am
sure there is more going on than just that, but I am not sure what. Is there
a more specialized place where I can post this question.

Thank you,

LynchburgRecord

 

[Jay Freedman]

You could try posting your question as a comment on Murray Sargent's
blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/default.aspx. Before you do
that, scan through his blog entries to see if he's discussed these
things already.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Yves Dhondt]

It's a text versus math thing.

In your first example, as there is NO integrand (and no limits), the
integral symbol is considered an ordinary unicode character (U+222B).
Basically it's a letter like a, b, c, ... and therefore the way it is drawn
depends on how it is specified in the font you are using. The only way to
make it grow is by specifying a larger font size.

In your second example, the integrand (the medium shade symbol) actually
ensures that the entire thing is seen as a math sequence. This means that it
is drawn by the "math layout engine" of Word.

(The exact same thing happens with the sum operator.)

Yves