The defacto standard for sharing documents across the internet is Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf). Adobe provides a free viewer, called Acrobat Reader [version 6.0 (at present)].

A 696 page document outlining the specifics of the PDF file format is available here [NO LONGER FURNISHED by Adobe!]

Check here for extensive PDF FAQs (frequently asked questions).

PDF files are closely related to PostScript (.ps) files in structure. One standard viewer for Unix is called ghostview. To view .ps files under Windows, it is advisable to convert them to .pdf files with Adobe distiller. A script, ps2pdf, exists on calclab to convert .ps files to .pdf files. (Make sure you use times postscript fonts when you create .tex documents or the pdf file will look lousy).

Another very portable format is called the Rich Text Format (.rtf). It is the defacto standard from importing and exporting Microsoft documents across browsers and OS's. It's specification can be found here .

It is also a convenient way to get Microsoft formatted documents into Star Office and AnyWare which are two office suites for Linux/Unix. Although you can download star office for free, it is large (79-105Mb). Another Microsoft compatible suite is Open Office version 1.1.2

For viewing on the web, HTML is the standard. It can be enhanced by CSS style files, and XML (XHTML, XLS, and their cousins).

For viewing tex documents, the output of (la)tex is a device independent .dvi file, and there exists a viewer (xdvi) on all X-Windows Unix systems.

You can try LaTeX2html to convert TeX and LaTeX files to HTML for the web. It produces reasonable quality output, but not as good as interactive pdf files.

A link to AcroTeX - a way of creating sophisticated interactive hyperlinked pdf files from LaTeX.

1. Windows:
   1. Use Office (95, 97, 2000, XP) to generate text, and the builtin Equation editor to generate equations. Then export to HTML with the Save As... option.
      Note, with Office 2000 and XP, documents will be loaded with XML commands, which cannot be read very well by Netscape...
   2. Use other Word Processing software (Corel, Adobe, etc.) to generate text/equations and then use Adobe Exchange to convert to PDF files.
2. Linux/Unix
   1. Use LaTex2e with \usepackage{times}, \usepackage{mathptm} to generate .tex documents.
      Convert to PDF via:
      .tex [via LaTex] -> .dvi [via dvips] -> .ps [via distill or ps2pdf] -> .pdf
   2. Use StarOffice, Corel, or ApplixWare to create MS Office compatible documents.
3. MacIntosh
   1. Use Apple Works or Adobe to create documents. Export to PostScript or PDF.

Check for a convenient summary.

The standard graphics viewing program under Linux/Unix is xv.

A freeware viewer for Windows "XnView" can be found here. It is similar in spirit to "xv". It reads almost 300 different graphics formats.

One of the best programs for viewing multimedia files under Linux/Unix is a program called xine .