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BULB BANTER => General Discussion => Topic started by: Tim on April 18, 2005, 09:28:39 pm

Title: Mathematical formulas in HTML?
Post by: Tim on April 18, 2005, 09:28:39 pm

I know, this is way off topic, but perhaps there's a math guru / HTML guru out here that could help me out. I am trying to figure out how to represent math formulas in HTML so they are displayed correctly on a web page. For example, take the formula attached below. It is attached as an image, but I would like to represent this formula in a web page using HTML / plain text. Anyone know if this is possible, or how to do it???

Title: Re: Mathematical formulas in HTML?
Post by: Chris W. Millinship on April 19, 2005, 03:20:55 pm

I don`t believe it can be done, at least not easilly. Unfortunately HTML is such a dynamic design language that it is practically impossible to make something as complex as that to line up correctly 100% (or even just 95%) of the time. You *could* try specifying a monospace typeface like Courier and doing it "Ascii-Art" style, except on web pages spaces dissapear uinless there`s something to fill them. I believe there is the CODE tag which gives a monospaced representation of the code as typed, spaces and all, not sure though how you could correctly display the Greek symbols though, let alone the correct length lines.

Probably best to render it neatly in your preferred word processor/graphic program and shoot a screen-shot, paste, crop and save the output file as a b/w GIF.

:|

Title: Re: Mathematical formulas in HTML?
Post by: Tim on April 19, 2005, 07:29:37 pm

Thanks for the suggestion Chris.

I did some searching and discovered there’s a markup language dedicated to mathematics that can be converted into HTML using table structures to achieve good looking results:

http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/

The initial process looks complicated and confusing and I think I discovered a much easier method.? MS Word has a tool that can be used to create a similar math formula and the result can be exported out as a clean looking image file.? This can be embedded into a web page as you suggested.? It sounds easy anyway? :|

Title: Re: Mathematical formulas in HTML?
Post by: debook on April 21, 2005, 06:27:08 am

The standard used in scientific publishing is LATEX http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~dwilkins/LaTeXPrimer/

It is essentially Unix but a Windows version probably exists. It generates html but converts the formulae to a graphic with transparent background.

Other options are here http://www.univie.ac.at/future.media/moe/formeln.html

Generally you are told to use the Windows only Symbol font, much better to use a page encoding of UTF-8 and Unicode characters for the symbols. ∂∆∏∑−∙∞∟∩∫≈≠≡≤≥

Here is one in an HTML table... too complicated to do by hand unless you only want do occasionally. Also as it uses the big tag to increase character size it will get messed up by the many users who set different font sizes in their browsers.

Laplacian of u = Delta u = { sum from i = 1 to n } d^2u / dx_i^2

Code: [Select]

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td>∆u = Δu =</td>
<td align="center"><small>n<br>
</small><big><big><big>∑</big></big></big><small><br>
i<small> </small>=<small> </small>1</small></td>

<td>∂<sup>2</sup>u<big>/</big>∂x<sub>i</sub><sup>2</sup></td>
</tr>

</table>

Which fudged a bit because of the board code looks something like this:

.
∆u = ∆u =

n
∑
i = 1

.
∂²u/∂x_i²

Title: Re: Mathematical formulas in HTML?
Post by: debook on April 21, 2005, 08:22:14 am

And just for fun, dots needed as no centring option

	. . . L		LdV ——— dL		. V+∆V_B
“ f ” =	———	=	———————	=	———————
	L — ∆L_D		(L — ∆L_D) dV		V + ∆V_B — ∆V_D
			. . . . . . . —— . . . . . . . .dL

Title: Re: Mathematical formulas in HTML?
Post by: Tim on April 21, 2005, 08:09:20 pm

Frank,

I'm impressed!

Thanks for the links. I did come across both during my search and they were helpful.? Yesterday I download MikTex for Windows (http://www.miktex.org/) and have been messing around with it a little bit...

I like that rabbit neon? :-)