[texhax] Blogs

[Victor Ivrii]

On 7/18/06, tom sgouros <tomfool at as220.org> wrote:
>
> > One possible approach that could work in both cases might be texvc
> > which itself is used by mediawiki (the software responsible for
> > wikipedia). To quote directly from the texvc README:
> >
> > "texvc takes LaTeX-compatible equations and produces formatted output in
> > HTML, MathML, and (via LaTeX/dvips/ImageMagick) rasterized PNG images.
> > Input data is parsed and scrutinized for safety, and the output includes
> > an estimate of whether the code is simple enough that HTML rendering
> > will
> > look acceptable."
>
> I think the real issue here is that posting images via blog software
> like DailyKos is kind of a pain.  You can type all you want in the post
> window, and use html formatting as elaborate as you want, but you can't
> upload images to the blog server.

There is no such thing as blog server; there is web server, running
also blog s/w
And one can store images on web server. Well, this would not make any difference
unless this process is automatized. And it is exactly where

Movabletype blogware
http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/
with RooLaTeX plug-in comes.

There are plenty other plug-ins, doing different types of formattings
but on their own. RooLaTeX on the other hand uses TeX installation and
this is a problem: to find web
server with TeX installed. Or to have your own web server.

Mediawiki has its own TeX, but it should be compiled and it is in
OCaml, so one needs first to download OCaml source, compile it and
then compile texvc using OCaml. Actually I did a similar thing long
ago for different s/w.

> Instead you have to find somewhere
> else to post the images that won't mind the volume of downloads and link
> to them from your posting.
>
> There are several solutions to converting LaTeX to HTML, but since
> mathML isn't yet a widely used standard, to my knowledge, they all
> convert the equations to PNG or GIF or some image format, and
> segregating these images, posting them on picture-trove.com or wherever,
> and making sure the links from your blog text work properly is hard
> work.  Not as hard as coal-mining, say, but computers are supposed to
> make our lives *easier.*

Well, html has rather primitive equation ability, one can display many symbols
http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/symbols.html
but alignment is a big problem.

>
> So I think the most useful way to reframe the question might be: is
> anyone aware of a LaTeX to HTML converter that does *not* use images for
> equations, and if so, how does it work?  As I said, I don't know of one,
> but others on this list know a lot more than me.

html limitations give you no choice

Actually latex2html can produce different formats, MathML included


-- 
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Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto