[Insight-developers] Equations in GIF vs MathML from latex2html

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi,


On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Sayan Pathak wrote:

> Hi,
> Someone raised issues regarding documentation of equations. Currently the
> latex equations are converted into gif files which is in my opinion ugly.
>
That's true, but this is the result of using just the default options of 
latex2html, which in general are not the best looking ones. 

If anti-aliasing, good foreground and background colors and a good resolution
are selected, equations can have a good appearance in gif format. 
The MATH_SCALE_FACTOR and DISP_SCALE_FACTOR environment variables can also 
help to improve the visual presentation of equations in gif format by 
increasing the relative resolution of the image.

A similar control is available for figures using FIGURE_SCALE_FACTOR.


> MathML is an emerging standard and looks like future browsers are moving
> towards that direction. I am attaching a link that talks about where things
> are with respect to MathML currently.
>  http://www.w3.org/Math/
> 
I agree that MathML is a better option than using gif.
In fact, latex2html is among the packages listed in the w3.org/Math site as
supporting MathML.

Latex2html can generate MathML tags instead of gif images, if the 
special 'math' extension is loaded and the '-no_math' switch is not used. 

That let users to choose how to represent equations in their texts.

There is a lot of options in latex2html that can change a lot the 
appearance of texts translated from latex. All these options can be placed
in a config file to define a customized style.



Luis