Comments on: Religious wars and LaTeX tools

By: Kurt

Kurt — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 03:33:52 +0000

Hi Mike,I’ll have to take a look at those conversion utilities. Michael Nielsen, on his blog, uses this technique for his technical posts, but I forget off-hand which converter he uses.Ironically, although it requires a couple of plug-ins to do it, IE seems to be the only browser that offers good support for both MathML and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). It’s too bad, because this combination would seem to be the natural choice for math exposition on the Web.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 22 Oct 2005 23:30:53 +0000

Hi Kurt. Mike Christoff again. Sorry, think I was reading about the tour de France that evening. With regard to mathematical expressions in web pages, I would avoid MathML as its not natively supported by Internet Explorer.Unfortunately, the best cross-browser way, IMO, to do this is to embed GIF images of the expressions in your web pages (I agree with another reader that using PDFs would probably not be well accepted by potential readers).That said, and the fact that you wish to learn LaTeX, I’d suggest taking a look at the following page:http://www.w3.org/Tools/Word_proc_filters.htmlin the “TeX, LaTeX etc.” section. There appear to be a number of programs that can convert LaTex to html.-mike

By: Kurt

Kurt — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 03:15:20 +0000

Hi Mike,You meant to say “Kurt” and not “Lance”, right?!Thanks for the links. Yes, LaTeX would probably be overkill for the typical post, and for simple mathematical expressions I may just use the HTML entities. (Although that’s going to mean learning two sets of character and symbol names!) But mainly I’m looking for an excuse to force myself to learn LaTeX, because eventually I hope to write some papers, and I’ll need it then.I’ve been a little slow getting up to speed on this blog, as I haven’t been able to spend quite as much time on it as I’d like. I’ve also spent <>way<> too much time reading other people’s blogs, but that’s also part of the learning process. Once I get comfortable with the mechanics of communicating through this medium (which should be pretty soon), I’ll probably advertise a little bit to drum up some more readership.-Kurt

By: MikeC

MikeC — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 02:28:55 +0000

Hi Lance. This is Mike Christoff from comp-sci-theory. Congrats on the new blog.I just thought I’d mention the use of what are called HTML entity references for special notation. Now, you won’t be able to get all the fancy mathematical typesetting, but you should be able to get a wealth of special characters.For example, all the letters in the greek alphabet are included in the standard character set.Check outhttp://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/for a decent reference (no pun intended).Also check outhttp://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/entities.htmlfor the official standard docs.Good luck, and may the blog be with you!-mike