Putting/Viewing TeX on the Web


Viewing documents generated from TeX input/source on the Web is not straightforward: DVI is not understood by your average browser; TeX documents often have a lot of mathematics in them; MathML is in its infancy; TeX documents are of good publication quality and HTML is hard pushed to match this. Enough said. Three strategies:

A Plugin for Netscapeon Unix and Linux; a Browser that Does DVI

There exists a plugin for Netscape which allows DVI-format documents to be viewed directly within the browser. This plugin, nDVI, supports HyperTeX as a bonus. Unfortunately the plugin is only for Unix and Linux and there is a known bug in Netscape which causes nDVI to hang --- though there is a workaround for Linux.

Use PDF!

PDF certainly matches TeX for document quality and handles mathematics just fine. And, of course, PDF supports hyperlinks. Furthermore, just about everyone can handle PDF thesedays. So use PDFTeX. The only draw back to this is that PDF and TeX's bitmap fonts don't go together well, so postscript fonts should be used. Well, that's not so bad, though you'll need to find some postscript fonts which support mathematics well.

LaTeX2HTML

Another option is to convert the TeX input/source to HTML --- but what about the maths? LaTeX2HTML handles this by converting each equation to an inline GIF image. The result is not exactly pretty, but surely good enough for most purposes. LaTeX2HTML also does nice things like break your long, multi-sectioned TeX file up into separate HTML pages. For for information visit the author's web page.




About this document:

Produced from the SGML: /home/isd/public_html/_tex/_reml_grp/tex_putting_on_the_web.reml_lib
On: 4/12/2002 at 12:51:21
Options: reml2 -i noindex -l long -o html -p multiple