The WebEQ™ Toolbar

EDU and the WebEQ Editor

The EDU system uses the WebEQ™ environment for editing and displaying symbolic characters and MathML content. The palette question type enables you to use customized WebEQ toolbars and palettes in creating student response objects.

This information is provided as background only. For more information and examples, go to the Design Science Web site and download the WebEQ Developers Suite.

From the WebEQ Developers Suite

Learning to use the toolbar is key to mastering the WebEQ Editor. The toolbar is used to insert equation templates and symbols. It also has icons for common operations like "cut" and "paste".

The standard toolbar contains three main panels. The left side of the toolbar consists of pop-up palettes containing an assortment of equation templates. Templates are highlighted as you mouse over them. To insert a template, click or release the mouse over a highlighted template. Note that as you mouse over a template, a description is displayed in the Editor status line at the bottom of the screen.

The middle section of the standard toolbar consists of pop-up palettes containing symbol characters. As with the template palettes, you insert a symbol by mousing over to highlight, and then releasing or clicking the mouse. The MathML symbol names are displayed in the Editor status line as you mouse over them on the toolbar.

Equation template and symbol character palettes are broadly organized by theme, such as 'calculus templates' or 'arrow symbols'. Spend a few minutes exploring the toolbar to familiarize yourself with the available templates and symbols.

The right side of the toolbar is a 'toolbox' of icons for various useful Editor operations. You can distinguish such operation icons by their blue coloring. In addition to the standard 'cut', 'copy', 'paste' and 'undo' icons, there are buttons for shrinking and magnifying the current equation, a 'check syntax' icon and a 'help' icon. See Generating Content Markup for more on the role of the 'check syntax' button.

Customizing the Toolbar

A powerful new feature in WebEQ 3 is that Editor toolbars can be customized. WebEQ Editor comes with a standard toolbar, as well as a several other predefined toolbars. You can also define your own custom toolbar configurations.

To use an alternative toolbar, select "Toolbar Preferences" from the Preferences menu. The Toolbar Preferences window will appear.

The pull-down menu at the top left of the Toolbar Preferences window displays the list of predefined toolbars. By selecting "custom" and specifying a path to a custom configuration file in the adjacent text area, you can load your own custom toolbar.