Vort.org... now with more math!
So, until MathML takes over the world, or is replaced by something that people might actually want to use, there is a fantastic little program called mimeTeX. Once it is happily nestled in your cgi-bin directory (remember CGI?), mimeTeX will burble forth all the equations you could ever want. You just pass it a string of LaTeX math mode in as a query, and out pops beautiful equations:
Oh, and if you are too lazy to install it yourself, I warn you now not to use mine. I will use url_rewrite to introduce embarrassing mistakes into your posts.
Now I want to use your CGI so I can see what amusing mathematical jokes you can come up with.
Will it be "let |episilon| < 0"?
Will it be "integral of e to the x = f(u to the n)"?
"ignored" isn't really the right word, for starters there is a non empty intersection between the authors/maintainers of latex and the editors of MathML (and the commenters on this page:-)
All the example renderings on the mathml spec were generated with LaTeX as well as it happens.
The latex typeset equation _was_ beautiful, but by the time it's been rendered to an image it's low resolution fuzzy stuff that can't align correctly (which doesn't matter for displayed equations like your example) and can't be seached or used elsewhere. If you took the same input but just used a tex-mml tool rather than a tex-image one on the server you'd end up with searchable, scalable text that resizes with the surrounding text, can be cut and pasted into maple, etc (even microsoft word these days)
mathml is the way it for a reason, it's not just gratuitous ugliness:-)
of course you'd also end up with having to make sure that your readers were set up to cope with MathML and crucially XHTML served as XML rather than HTML tag soup, which is unfortunate nonsense that hopefully will get resolved in time (we're working on it!) but that's mainly an XHTML issue rather than a MathML one.
David
Neat! I am glad to know that LaTeX and MathML are cooperating to some extent.
What I want is to be able to write equations in LaTeX math mode and put them into web pages. Obviously, it would be silly to render them as Postscript, or as images. The mimeTeX implementation uses images because it's convenient to set up, and doesn't require the client to have anything special. Ideally, you'd want equations rendered in some sort of scalable, searchable way. Ultimately, I don't care how it's implemented as long as the output looks good and I can use LaTeX markup to create it.
My biggest complaint about MathML is that it is written in XML. I think XML has become the most human-unfriendly markup specification ever devised. It's easier to hand-edit an ELF binary without breaking it than an XML file. MathML may be capable of producing beautiful-looking, scalable searchable equations, but if I have to write XML to use it, then I'm not going to use MathML.
I realize this may be a little late, but have you seen the latex to mathml converter:
http://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/drw/lm.html
It is a large javascript file, but their example page has some nice output (on firefox 2+ at least). If I write some stuff or convert some of my existing stuff I will let you know.
I realize this may be a little late, but have you seen the latex to mathml converter:
http://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/drw/lm.html
It is a large javascript file, but their example page has some nice output (on firefox 2+ at least). If I write some stuff or convert some of my existing stuff I will let you know.
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