[Axiom-developer] RE: Another question

[Bill Page]

Alfredo

On August 18, 2006 4:59 PM you asked:

> Probably this has come out many times in previous discussions.
> Given the latex output from Axiom, what would be the best way
> to display it on a webpage. 
>
> Complete as latex document -> latex -> dvipng??? 

By "complete" do you mean the output of an entire Axiom session?
Using just dvipng would result in one png file for each page of
the latex document. Certainly it is possible to present the output
of LaTeX in this format but treating everything as an image has
severe limitations in a web browser.

To render a LaTeX document, I think you would be better off using
latex to HTML tool like TeX4ht

http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/TeX4ht/mn.html

instead of just dvipng. TeX4ht will generate HTML with embedded
graphics or with MathML. Many people consider MathML the best
available format for web browsers. I agree that it probably will
be "real-soon-now".

> or how is it done on MathAction?

In MathAction (actually in ZWiki/LatexWiki) a wiki page is
composed of HTML with embedded png images only to represent the
mathematical formula. In the current version of MathAction the
png files are generated by ghostscript but Bob McElrath did have
an experimental version of LatexWiki that used dvipng. As I
recall there were some subtle issues regarding defining the image
baseline for proper inline placement of LaTeX-generated symbols.

This is very much like what TeX4ht does except that the source
format of the page is not LaTeX but rather StructuredText and/or
HTML with embedded LaTeX and Axiom commands.

As I mentioned earlier, an alternative to embedded graphics and
MathML is jsMath which uses Javascript to emulate the LaTeX math
typesetting functions directly on the web browser. Because this
is a complex process that runs in Javascript, it is quite a bit
slower than rendering HTML with embedded graphics. The AxiomUI
project made use of jsMath.

As you know, pamphlet files on MathAction are treated a little
differently with only a "thumbnail" displayed on the web page
containing links to the pdf and dvi format generated by LaTeX.
Originally we had planned to use TeX4ht to produce a web page
(or set of web pages) from the pamphlet source but there turned
out to be some technical limitations. It is quite possible with
some additional effort these problems could be solved. If you are
interested about this possibility, please ask.

Regards,
Bill Page.