Question

I am working on a Math related web page and am looking for a solution to writing Mathematical equations easily onto a web page. There are several solutions readily available to me at the moment:

• Use LaTeX and publish them on my web page as images.
• Use MathML

Both of these solutions aren’t ideal and seem somewhat dated. Replacing what should be text with an image is never a good idea and MathML isn’t compliant with all browsers/operating systems.

I’m hoping that there is a modern solution to using images or MathML, perhaps something utilising sIFR to display mathematical equations? After a bit of research I am still yet to find any real solution.

Please note that I am asking for a new way of publishing equations. I do not want images to be the output that is displayed on the web page and would rather have these equations rendered as textual data. MathML is the closest I’ve come, but it’s still not ideal. I’ve wondered for a while whether a replacement tool like sIFR could be utilised to create equations in Flash. Anyone have any suggestions on this front?

EDIT: It’s been a while since I last updated this post, but with HTML5 becoming adopted by browsers there is a new player in the game that introduces LaTeX and MathML back into the mix, MathJax!. MathJax are definitely the way to go!

Similar Question: Math equations on the web

Answer 1

The jsMath package is an option that uses LaTeX markup and native fonts. Quoting from their webpage http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/:

The jsMath package provides a method
of including mathematics in HTML pages
that works across multiple browsers
under Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux
and other flavors of unix. It
overcomes a number of the shortcomings
of the traditional method of using
images to represent mathematics:
jsMath uses native fonts, so they
resize when you change the size of the
text in your browser, they print at
the full resolution of your printer,
and you don’t have to wait for dozens
of images to be downloaded in order to
see the mathematics in a web page.
There are also advantages for web-page
authors, as there is no need to
preprocess your web pages to generate
any images, and the mathematics is
entered in TeX form, so it is easy to
create and maintain your web pages.

See for example this page or that one.