DragginMath: Annotations

DragginMath can annotate your solutions. This gives a reader more context and additional explanations for each step. To begin annotation, swipe left on a step in History ⬆️.

Each step can have an annotation before the step, and another annotation after the step. You are not required to use both, or either. Only make annotations where you think they will be helpful.

To add or edit an annotation before a step, tap the upper text area on the annotation screen, then use the pop-up screen keyboard.

To add or edit an annotation after a step, tap the lower text area on the annotation screen, then use the pop-up screen keyboard.

The current step is shown between the two text areas. The previous step is shown above, and the next step is shown below. If you tap the previous step, it becomes the current step. If you tap the next step, it becomes the current step. You can move all the way through a problem’s steps this way, annotating as you go.

When you finish annotating a problem, tap the button on the screen keyboard that makes the keyboard go away, then tap OK at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t tell the screen keyboard to go away, you will not be able to tap OK.

Notice the special math characters at the top of the pop-up keyboard. These help you write expressions the way DragginMath writes them. In particular, notice the variety of dashes that are available, indicating subtraction (– in the top row), negation (- on the regular screen keyboard), and negativity (⁻ in the top row). Also, the asterisk (∗) in the top row is not quite the same as the regular asterisk (* or shift-8 on the regular screen keyboard). You must choose the proper characters in annotations: DragginMath cannot check what you write here, and incorrect annotations can be worse than no annotations at all.

Keep annotations short and to the point, and remember that other users may not have the same size screen as you. DragginMath tries to format annotations accordingly, but there are limits to what it can do. If you need to make lengthy explanations, do that in another document that you distribute with your DragginMath problem file.

To see annotations on the main DragginMath screen, use the undo ↩️ and redo ↪️ buttons. If a step has annotations, these appear in sequence when you tap redo ↪️.

If you have a hardware keyboard attached to your device, detach it or otherwise turn it off when writing annotations. The interaction of hardware keyboards with the annotation screen has a bug we have not been able to work around. If you encounter this bug, you will have to kill and restart DragginMath to make or edit annotations again. If you notice this warning is missing in some future version of DragginMath, that means either we or Apple have fixed the bug.