| | | Putting LaTeX documents on the Web |
How can you make LaTeX documents available on the World-Wide Web? The
simplest way is to put either the .dvi file or the
.ps file in the directory where your web files live (on
a Unix system, the public_html directory), make the
file world-readable, and put a link to it on your homepage.
Since not everybody has a viewer for .dvi or .ps
files, a better method is to produce PDF from the LaTeX document, since PDF is
almost universally readable. The objection to each of these
methods is that your document is frozen in format.
Various methods have been proposed for translating LaTeX documents into a format such as HTML that is more natural for display on the World-Wide Web. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses. This section discusses a few of these methods. For links to other methods, see a list from the TeX Users' Group and the foot of the TeX4ht home page.
Perhaps the best known conversion program is
LaTeX2HTML.
After running latex filename, you run latex2html
filename, and after the program finishes running (which may
take quite a while), you should have an HTML document.
Mathematical formulas are automatically converted into
gif files and linked into the HTML document.
LaTeX2HTML
is the closest thing there is to a standard mechanism for
putting LaTeX documents with mathematics onto the World-Wide Web.
However, there are disadvantages to displaying formulas as
gif files. The formulas do not resize if the user
changes the size of the browser's fonts, and transferring many
gif files across the Internet can be slow.
A somewhat different approach is taken by
Hyperlatex. This program
does not attempt to be a universal converter from LaTeX to
HTML. Instead, it allows you to write a LaTeX document
(with a restricted subset of LaTeX commands) that can be
used either to produce a normal printed document by running the
command latex or to produce a corresponding HTML document by running the command hyperlatex.
Hyperlatex supports
conditional text that is processed only in LaTeX mode or
only in HTML mode. It can optionally turn mathematical
formulas into gif images. The pages you are currently
reading were formatted with Hyperlatex.
A radically different approach is taken by
TTH. It attempts to
translate LaTeX into HTML while rendering formulas with
ordinary characters instead of with gif images.
Unfortunately, TTH works only if the
browser is configured in a nonstandard way.
The basic difficulty in converting LaTeX to HTML is that World-Wide Web browsers have limited support for sophisticated display of mathematics. Although the World Wide Web Consortium formalized the Mathematical Markup Language MathML in 1998, the mainstream browsers had only limited support for MathML as of the fall of 2001.
Both Mathematica and Maple are supporting MathML, and browser support should improve soon. The W3C testbed browser Amaya can read and edit MathML. The PC equation editor MathType can translate into both LaTeX and MathML.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | Putting LaTeX documents on the Web |