## Customizing MathCast

There are a number of changes you can make to improve your MathCast usage experience. These changes manipulate the appearance and functionality of Mathcast. In order to make these modifications, you must edit some of MathCast files. If you try to edit the files mentioned below and you can't see some of the characters correctly, choose the Lucida Sans Unicode font.

#### The Lowlist

The Lowlist is the list of characters listed in the bottom of the Edit Screen. You can easily edit the file “lowlist.dat”, located in the “Interface” folder, and change the characters or add new ones.

#### Quick Keys

In the Rapid Mathline, pressing a key a few times can show other symbols. You can easily set these symbols through the “Keys.dat” file.

#### Adding Characters and Function Names

All the characters and function names that MathCast is aware of are located in the “Known.xml” file.
Here are the main guidelines:

- The document element is called “mathematics”.
- The “mathematics” element has the following child elements: groups, letters, operators, shortcuts, functions, and markup.
- The “g”s of the“groups” are the same as the names of the menu items in the Math Menu, in the same order.
- The “letters” and “functions” correspond to the “mi” element of MathML.
- The “operators” correspond to the “mo” element of MathML.
- The “markup” are characters for main MathML tags.
- The “shortcuts” are a combination of other elements.

Here are the guidelines for the “in” element:

- Every symbol or function name has its own “in” element.
- The text of the “m” element is the text that appears in the MathML.
- The text of the “t” element is the text you have to type in the Rapid Mathline.
- The text of the “i” element is just the name of the character or function.
- Every “in” element is a child of a “group” element, in which its name you can see in the Math Menu.

To add a character of function name: locate the group name you want to add to, copy a close-by “in” tag and change the accordingly. Don’t change anything from the “markup” element.

#### Changing the Appearance

The settings for MathCast are located in Mathcast's folder in a file called “settings.xml”. There are three settings that control the colors of MathCast. These settings can be changed by editing the settings file with WordPad. The colors are in hexadecimal format.

- tableColor - the light blue color used to draw the table.
- selectionBoxColor - the pink box that surrounds the selected equation.

The pictures of the buttons, backgrounds, and icons can also be changed. All the pictures used by MathCast the “Interface” directory. Try to keep the pictures of the buttons the same size, otherwise MathCast might not work correctly.

#### The Size of Spaces

In the Rapid Mathline the Ctrl+S key makes a space. You can customize the default length of this space in the “settings.xml” file: the tag to change is “spaceSize”.