Web display of mathematical equations

ajfox Last modified: Tue Jun 29 14:43:29 1999

Current Options

At present, the options for including mathematics on web pages are limited by browser capabilities. Current methods for displaying equations fall into two categories:
Browser display
The basis of the document is HTML. Equations are displayed with embedded images or Java applets, or are rendered natively as text (possibly with the use of symbol fonts from the browser).
Graphical page display
Full-page images of the document are rendered by a viewer or plug-in from files in page-description languages (TeX/DVI/PS or PDF), or are displayed directly in the browser (e.g., images scanned from paper originals).

For direct creation of HTML-based documents, the choices are the same as for any Web authoring task (a text editor or full-featured, WYSIWYG program), and the process of embedding images of equations is the same as placing any image on a Web page. Equation editors included with word processing applications may be used to generate images of simple equations, and newer tools dedicated to mathematics such as WebEQ include both WYSIWYG math palettes and a typesetting syntax to generate images of equations or equation-rendering applets.

There are various conversion programs to translate TeX/LaTeX files to HTML; these may generate images for equations, or attempt to represent them in native HTML. Packages such as Maple and Mathematica let you save directly to HTML with images and/or generate images of single equations.

Samples and Tools

Displaying Math on the Web is a site created by Academic Computing with samples of the different approaches mentioned above, all generated with tools available on Athena. It includes:

Future Prospects

Ongoing developments toward integrated Web publishing of mathematics have led to the creation of MathML, an XML-based format for marking up equations both in terms of presentation and structure. It is intended not only to encode mathematical notation for visual display, but also to capture semantics in a way that lets other tools process the content of equations. MathML basically consists of a set of HTML-like tags used hierarchically to represent the structural relationships between elements in a mathematical expression. It can be read by humans, but is extremely verbose and is intended not for direct editing but rather for machine-to-machine communication, including authoring tools or syntax converters.

Ultimately, the hope is that browsers will be able to render MathML directly; it is already being incorporated into authoring tools, applets, and plug-ins aimed at the scientific community. Further information on putting math on the web


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