According to the author, the metafiles were placed in Word 2003 as ‘mathematical equation 3.0’ objects. I tried opening these with MathType 6.9 but it is able to open only a very small subset of the many equations in the document.
I emailed Design Science for their opinion, but I am afraid that something similar to what is described in the article ‘Equations have become non-editable “pictures” in Microsoft Word’ may have happened to the documents I am working on.
Here is the article:
http://www.dessci.com/en/support/mathtype/tsn/tsn103.htm
The frustrating part is that equations look all right in Word, or when exported from Word to PDF. But the way Adobe reads WMF metafiles, they get messed up.
One such difference – Empty instead of Auto kerning is described in the following thread:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5330174#5330174
But this is not the only issue. For some metafiles, blindly setting all kerning to auto messes them up. Some other metafiles exhibit bizarre vertical positioning of elements and/or shifts of clipping paths. The combination of these issues makes it very complex to write one-fits-all script to ‘fix’ the metafiles automatically.
It appears I need to find the appropriate Microsoft libraries to correctly load WMF files into some intermediate vector format, matching Microsoft Word rendering exactly, and then export into EPS or something else that InDesign is capable of processing without repositioning elements.
Any ideas what these libraries may be?
Thank you