[MINI-HOWTO] Convert LaTeX to HTML with MathML

robbyjo · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 462

If you're a graduate student or professor working in your research papers, you'd most likely use LaTeX. LaTeX is awesome especially in typing mathematical formulas. Most likely, the papers you're making will be put into postscript (PS) or PDF file for publication. Sometimes, you'd prefer to have that convert it directly to HTML for direct viewing through your webpage. There was a program to do this, called latex2html, which could do a decent job. However, latex2html always converts mathematical formulas or symbols into graphics, to either PNG or GIF. This means that if you have tons of mathematical formulas, you'd end up with hundreds or sometimes thousands of tiny PNG/GIF files, which is really bad for user and server. Not only that, the PNG or GIF files are usually of very low quality, full of jagged edges.

Converting mathematical formulas or symbols to graphics were unavoidable in yester years, where we don't have adequate expression to do so. However, in recent year, W3 has developed MathML to address this issue. We certainly would like to incorporate this new standard for our purposes.

Before we do anything, I'd suggest you to do "emerge --sync" to obtain the latest greatest package from the portage repository.

1. Installing LaTeX

If you have already installed LaTeX, you can safely skip this section.

To install LaTeX, invoke the following command:

jdgill0 · Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:59 pm Post subject:

This looks great. Not so long ago, I needed/wanted to do just what you are talking about here. I found latex2html not so good.

Thanks for the tips/howto.

[EDIT]
I meant to also ask, is it necessary to use ~x86 version of tetex, i.e. 3.x?
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robbyjo · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 462

No problem. I'm glad to be of help.

jdgill0 · Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2005 11:04 pm Post subject:

Guess I'll have to try and see huh

... btw, is there some new benifits or new features with tetex 3.x that would make you want to use it instead of the stable 2.x branch?
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Learn how to use Vim: vimtutor

robbyjo · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 462

Unsure about that either. I think TeX 3.0 has huge bugfixes from 2.0. That's the impression that I got from the changelog.

gustafson · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2004 Posts: 430

Hey, this looks great..

For most people, this will create a MathML font issue for firefox or mozilla.

the solution is to emerge the following:

flieslikeabeagle · n00b Joined: 05 Dec 2003 Posts: 28 Location: Los Angeles

I just found this thread via a Google search, as I have a Latex document I wish to convert to a web page. It looks as though Tex4ht has a massive bug - it fails to correctly render any fractions generated using \frac{}{} in the Latex document. After running mzlatex, the generated MathML displays as a single line of math symbols with the fraction line completely gone - the denominator simply follows the numerator as though it were multiplied by it!

For instance, the Latex code

drwholton · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2003 Posts: 12 Location: U.K.