Chemical formulas, financial ratios and short expressions written inside sentences stay inside the sentence in Word, flowing and wrapping with the text without throwing off line spacing.
Water treatment memo
Dissolving in water that already holds produces , and every litre of treated this way raises hardness by about 12 mg/L.
The plant upgrade is worth doing if at a discount rate of 8%, which it is: the payback period years falls inside the board's limit.
Prices such as $5 and $10 per unit are left alone, and $ prints a dollar sign.
Single dollar signs around a short expression. Currency amounts like $5 are detected and left as text.
Inline formulas are typeset compactly so lines with formulas are the same height as lines without.
In Word the formula is part of the paragraph. Type before it, after it, or click into it to edit.
Word draws two kinds of equation. A display equation sits in its own paragraph, centred, with limits stacked above and below operators and fractions at full height. An inline equation lives inside a run of ordinary text and has to behave like a word: it wraps at the end of a line, it takes the paragraph's alignment, and, critically, it should not make its line taller than its neighbours. In OMML terms a display equation is an m:oMathPara containing m:oMath, while an inline formula is a bare m:oMath placed between w:r text runs inside the same w:p. MDtoDOCX writes single-dollar formulas the second way. That single choice is what makes the formula flow rather than break the paragraph in two, and it is what most converters get wrong by promoting everything to display. The other two math pages cover symbol coverage and numbered block equations; this one is about what happens inside a sentence.
A stacked fraction is roughly twice the height of the surrounding text, and a sum with limits above and below is taller still. Inserted in the middle of a paragraph, either one pushes its line apart and produces the ragged spacing you see in badly converted reports. When a formula is inline, MDtoDOCX applies Word's own inline conventions: n-ary limits are written with m:limLoc set to subSup so they sit beside the operator, and fractions are written with m:type set to skw, the slanted form Word calls a skewed fraction, unless you wrote \dfrac to insist on the stacked version. Superscripts and subscripts are already compact. The result is a formula whose height is within the paragraph's normal line box, so spacing stays even through the whole page. In the preview the same rules are applied, which is why the memo sample above has equal line spacing despite containing a sum and a fraction.
Word italicises single letters in equations because it assumes they are variables. For a chemical formula that is wrong: H₂O should be upright. MDtoDOCX detects element-symbol patterns, a capital letter optionally followed by one lowercase letter and a digit subscript, and writes them as upright runs with the m:nor flag, which is what Word does when you choose Normal Text in the equation editor. The result is , upright and correctly subscripted, while in the finance sentence stays italic because it is a variable. If you use the \ce{} notation from mhchem, the contents are treated the same way. Multi-letter identifiers such as NPV are also set upright, matching the convention in financial documents.
Inline math and currency share a delimiter, and a memo that mentions prices must not turn $5 and $10 into an equation. The rule is CommonMark-compatible: an opening dollar must be followed immediately by a non-space character and the closing dollar must be preceded by a non-space character and not followed by a digit. $5 and $10 fails that test on both ends and is left as text. Writing \$ always produces a literal dollar sign. If your document is finance-heavy and never uses math, the option treat $ as currency disables inline math entirely.
Formulas render in Cambria Math no matter which body font you choose, because that is the only math font Word ships and Word ignores font changes on math runs. Cambria Math is a serif, so an inline formula in a Calibri paragraph is visibly a different face. This is how Word itself behaves when you insert an equation, and readers are used to it. The formula's size follows the paragraph's font size, so a 12-point paragraph gets 12-point formulas.
In Word, click into an inline formula and the Equation tab appears. You can convert it to display with one click, change to linear form, or edit any symbol. Inline formulas are exported as native Word math objects; free users get the preview and the LaTeX source in the file, while Pro unlocks the download with the flowing equations. Formulas inside table cells follow the same inline rules. For full-line derivations use display math, described on the LaTeX to Word page.
| Inline behaviour | MDtoDOCX | Pandoc | Copy into Word |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formula placement | Inside the text run, wraps with the sentence | Inline m:oMath | Raw dollar text |
| Line height with fractions | Skewed fractions, side limits, even spacing | Stacked, line grows | n/a |
| Chemical formulas upright | Automatic | Italic unless mathrm is used | n/a |
| Currency detection | Yes, $5 and $10 stay text | Yes, similar rule | n/a |
| Convert inline to display in Word | One click | One click | Not possible |
| Preview of spacing | Yes | No | n/a |
| Install | None | Pandoc | None |