Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Making Equations for the Web (and other stuff)

Introduction

Well it doesn't take much to make me happy in life but equations on the web (or any word processor) generally have driven me up the wall.

Often I have resorted to MathCad as I am familiar with the application and usually gives mostly what I want but the down side is you usually end up with an image to paste.

Well I have come up with a slightly better method if somewhat circuitous but I think actually highlights some pretty good web pages.  The results could easily be applied to web pages or other documents that can handle HTML or as static images if they cannot.

Step 1 - Online LaTeX Editor - Make some LaTeX

This site has a comprehensive editor that can produce code in a number of forms include reproducing itself as embeddable editable code, straight image or LaTeX markup.  Its the LaTex markup we need for the next step.


Step 2 - Math to Web - Convert LaTeX to MathML

This site converts LaTex to MathML which can be embedded into a webpage as selectable text rather then a straight image.


Step 3 - Tryit Editor - Verify that it works as expected!

This site allows you to paste HTML (including the MathML generated above) and see your results rendered in an adjacent pane. MathML can be rendered by most modern browsers with varying degreres of success as per normal I would expect.


I hope you have found this as useful as I have.