Putting Mathematics on the Web
To start with the most basic: the problem is that HTML is well-designed to put up text. Math pages have a combination of text and math symbols and graphics. So, the method I first used is just to look at the math page as a large picture. Some examples of that were the Prerequisite Reviews for the developmental math courses http://www.austincc.edu/math/paprerev.html and the Reviews for the final exams for the developmental courses http://www.austincc.edu/~mthcyp/reviews/. (Actually, I didn't do either of these. But those who did do them were using these methods.) To see more about how to do this, read about scanning and screen shots below.
Suppose we want to do something closer to regular HTML -- where the text is really in HTML, but the graphs and maybe the equations are not. There are a variety of ways to do this. Many are described below. Mathematicians and those who are working on presentation of material on the web are looking at extensions of HTML which will enable us to put more things directly into code. The particular solution for math is MathML http://www.w3.org/Math/ . It is expected that web browsers will increasingly incorporate support for the extensions of HTML. To the extent that the various programs below support this, that will be mentioned.
This discussion is inspired by a talk at the Texas Section of the MAA annual meeting on April 7, 2000, by Karl Havlak at Tarleton. He told about some of their experiences putting math online, and I found it useful.
Microsoft Word:
The output from this method looks pretty good. However, each equation (each time you have invoked Equation Editor) is made into a different numbered .gif (graphics) file and a link is made in the main document to this file. Which numbers are used for the filenames depend on what else is in your directory at the time. These are pretty small files, so they load quickly. It is important to set up a scheme of storing your files that enables you to keep up with these small .gif files. I make sure to keep just a few different files of this type in the same directory, and make my directory structure on my own hard drive completely mimic the directory structure on my web page. When I upload the file, I upload the entire contents of the directory. Also, it's important that when you do "Save to HTML" in the first place, you save them into this directory. The same is true for whenever you edit them. You are likely to have problems if you start copying sets of files from one place to another on your hard drive. Not that that will always result in problems, but it easily can.
MS Word won't let you change the color of your equations. The Tarleton folks dealt with this by, after the .gif files were created, editing them in MS Photo Editor.
When you FTP the files to the web (if you upload that way), sometimes problems can occur because the FTP doesn't preserve cases. In other words, if the gif files are named Image1.gif and your FTP is set to do lower-case only, it will transfer the file as image1.gif and your document will not show the file it is looking for on the web. (When I first started doing this, it took me about six months or so to figure out that this was the problem!)
I recommend that you learn enough HTML to look into the source file for one of your web pages and see the names and locations of the files to which it is linking. I found this an incredible time-saver.
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top of this document.Microsoft Word with MathType 4.0
This is the method I mostly use. As far as web pages, you can "Save As HTML" just as in Microsoft Word without MathType 4.0 Read that discussion in this document.
However, it also has the option of using MathML http://www.w3.org/Math/ . At this time, I don't take advantage of the ability to convert to MathML because most browsers can't read that now. However, since my recent documents are prepared using this, when the version of the browsers that does support this becomes more available, it will not be hard to convert my files to Math ML.
What, exactly, will MathML allow that gifs, etc. won't? What I want is to be able to easily make different parts of an equation different colors, possibly make one part blink, change the size of one piece without changing the others, and, in general, have access to the various parts of the equation. Since Math ML has the parts of the equation available separately, not as one big gif file, all of these can be done with code in the equation itself.
Of course, most of those people who use MathType now are doing so because they find it easier and quicker to use than Equation Editor. Actually, Equation Editor is the scaled-down version of MathType that the company sells to Microsoft and others to put into word-processors. So using MathType is using the more powerful version of Equation Editor.
Previous versions of MathType, including the current Mac version (3.6) do not support MathML. Version 4 became available about April 1999. Presumably they are working on an updated Mac version. If anyone is interested, they could inquire.
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top of this document.Most people now have Adobe Acrobat Reader (which is free) available on their computer, so they can read the .pdf files that Adobe Acrobat creates. If you buy Adobe Acrobat (about $100 academic price) you can write such files. It inserts an option in your MS Word program "Create Adobe PDF". This is quite good at preserving the exact look of your original document, including equations, graphs, pictures, etc. It puts it into one file, just as the MS Word document was in one file. One feature of this is that people who download the pdf file will not be able to edit it. They can only look at it, print it, etc. as it is. In some circumstances, this is a drawback (distributing handouts that other teachers might choose to modify) and in other circumstances it is an advantage (distributing copies of something you wrote that you wouldn't want others modifying).
Adobe Acrobat is certainly available for Macs.
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top of this document.I have not had an opportunity to try this, so I don't have advice here yet. I understand that it supports both conversion to HTML and to MathML.
Of course, Mathematica is available for Macs.
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top of this document.Karl Havlak from Tarleton said that this was the method they chose to do their materials. It will support colors for equations, unlike MS Word, which was a major advantage for them. However, there were several drawbacks. One was that they couldn't figure out how to get subscripts and superscripts into a smaller font, as a regular matter, so expressions with them always looked funny. Another was that when they entered an algebraic problem for an exercise, and formatted it just as they wanted, when they saved the document and then re-opened it, Maple often simplified the expression. And, of course, that wasn't what they had in mind, since it was a problem for the students to do. A third problem was that when they did "copy and paste" to put the same equation in a different place, it often took along some formatting information in unexpected ways, and would mess up formatting in the surrounding text. My observation on this is that it must have been only the opening or closing HTML tags relevant to the formatting of the equation, not the entire tags.
By the time they discovered all of these problems, they were committed to Maple, so just patched as they could. When they had problems with a Maple expression, they used MS Word and pasted in the .gif file. If they wanted it colored, they took the .gif file into MS Photo Editor first to change the color and then took it into Maple. After they got the content in Maple, they opened the file in Netscape Composer to do fine-tuning on the HTML.
I haven't had an opportunity to try any of this in Maple. And Dr. Havlak did mention that he was sure that some of the software had some capabilities they didn't figure out how to use.
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top of this document.Karl Havlak and his group tried this and had some success, but didn't find it as satisfactory as some other solutions.
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top of this document.The folks doing the web course at A&M are using this. It generates files and the viewer needs to have Scientific Notebook on his/her own computer to read. That costs about $75. The file names end in .tex. I wonder whether these are TeX files and whether there will soon be a free TeX reader for browsers, like Acrobat Reader for .pdf files. I'll check around with some others who know more about this.
I understand that Scientific Notebook is not available for Macs.
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top of this document.Lori has looked at this. http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ The consortium who developed MathML has also developed this freeware to produce and view MathML pages. It may be that we will want to recommend to our students that they download this to view the MathML pages we write.
Amaya is available for a number of platforms. The list didn't include Macs, although since it is open-source, perhaps it will be quickly adapted.
Gifs (graphical interface files) are one type of graphics files. (.jpg files are also graphics files.) When you convert a Word document into HTML and it includes equations, those equations will be automatically turned into small .gif files.
As we all know, HTML itself does not allow enough formatting capability to put in equations as anything except as graphic files. MathML http://www.w3.org/Math/ is one of the extensions of HTML that does this. At this time, the standard browsers don't support viewing MathML. But no doubt they soon will do so. Each of us could download a browser/program that would enable us to do this. Probably I will do that soon. But these are of limited use until our students and others have such readers.
Return to the
top of this document.When you use a scanner to scan a document, you can use the OCR option to covert it to a text file. This is not particularly useful for something with equations, however, because those won't work out well. So math teachers will mostly use the OCR option for memos and things like that.
When you scan a page, you can leave the entire page as a graphics file. The disadvantage is that those are often very large files, so they take a long time to load. Also, some of the files that some of our staff have done for us in this method have not printed well. The advantage is that the page on the web looks exactly like your original page.
To do this, you need a scanner. You must learn about things like appropriate resolution of the scanning for different purposes, appropriate size of files, and about how to insert a graphics file into a document and upload that document to the web.
I haven't done screen shots. John Thomason did this at one point on a Mac and found it satisfactory.
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top of this document.Last updated April 9, 2000. Mary Parker