Including Math in Web pages

• Fake it -- For simple mathematical expressions, the best solution is to simply use the italics tags < i>< /i> and regular text. There are also a number of HTML mathematical character entities, for things like exponents (example: x²) that are useful for doing inline math formulas.

• Use latex2html -- latex2html is a converter that produces pretty good HTML documents from sufficiently simple LaTeX documents. If you are trying to convert an existing document with complicated user defined environments, chances are it won't convert well. On the other hand, if your source document is reasonably straightforward, it will give you a big head start, though you will probably want to edit the final HTML document. With a little finesse, it is usually possible to produce a really nice document.

  As a general rule, latex2html does better with displayed equations than inline equations. Thus you may wish to edit out expressions like $x$ before conversion and replace them with < i>x < /i> in the HTML document. For one thing, latex2html will produce a separate gif file for each mathmode expression it encounters, so at the very least, a little preliminary editing can save a lot of conversion time and disk space.

  For detailed information about latex2html, consult the author's online documentation, or the printed manual in the Geometry Center library (see map).

• Do it by hand -- The perfectionist will probably end up producing the necessary image files by hand. In outline, the procedure goes something like this:
  • Produce the expression with TeX
  • Display it on the screen with xdvi or ghostview or an equivalent
  • Grab the image with xv or an equivalent, process the image if necessary and save it as a gif file.
  • Make the background transparent using img2gif
  • Include it in your document.

  For details about using the graphics utilities mentioned above and their cousins, consult Graphics Resources.

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Comments to: webmaster@geom.umn.edu
Created: Fri Sep 8 11:39:00 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996