Online LaTeX

Someone has collected a useful bunch of links: Using LaTeX in WordPress » Online LaTeX

(Pasted from somewhere, to be cleaned up –)

For typesetting mathematics, there is LaTeX, of course. But what does one do next with the LaTeX file, if you intend the document to be viewable online? Using PDF files for online viewing is frowned upon. There is simply nothing better than HTML, and so one might consider using latex2html. This, however, usually uses images for almost everything leading to huge files and slow-loading pages. Much better in this regard TtH, which tries to make the mathematics display in plain HTML by hook or by crook, but this ends up looking ugly and defeats what was probably one of the major goals in using LaTeX in the first place. One could use MathML — writing a MathML document by hand is absurdly painful, but there is TtM which can convert LaTeX to MathML. But MathML creates XML (not HTML) files, and thus doesn’t plug into general text easily; it also requires the user to have some specific fonts installed, etc., and if a browser (like IE6) fails to display it correctly, the result is a mess. I just discovered that there is ASCIIMathML, which seems to handle everything very well. LaTeX-style formulas work (one can also use their simpler language, it appears). It still needs the fonts to be installed and everything, but when it fails (if JavaScript is disabled, for example), the user will simply see the “source code” of the mathematical text, which can still be readable.

docbook? tex4ht?

tbook?

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