Scientific Letter 1.10 - Email Program

Scientific Letter is a unique email program that lets you write, send and receive emails containing complicated equations easily and naturally. Unfortunately, Scientific Letter's email skills are underdeveloped and even the formula editing could need polishing.

Whether Galileo was right when he said nature's book is written in the language of mathematics or not, just about everything from the sides of a triangle to human behavior in extreme situations can be described using mathematical formulae. If you want include these omnipresent equations in your emails you have to rely on ugly plain text equivalents, PDF files or LaTeX syntax. Neither of these methods makes the flow of thoughts flourish, neither for you nor for the recipient.

Scientific Letter can help you solve this problem elegantly. Not your average email program, Scientific Letter lets you type most mathematical symbols and notations almost naturally. The interface relies on text shortcuts, which helps you type quickly and cleanly. But there are also quirks.

It's not always clear how you should go about entering a complicated construct, and the need for almost equally complicated combinations of Shift, Alt, Control and a few letters has the potential to frustrate. An alternative, LaTeX-oriented input method might prove useful. Scientific Letter also lacks a few symbols (logic operators, for example), and while the LaTeX-output for recipients who don't use Scientific Letter is helpful, other formats (images, PDF) might be too.

As an email client, Scientific Letter is a failure. It had problems sending and receiving mail and lacks any mail handling abilities. If it is used for "scientific" email only, Scientific Letter can be of a great use, though.