Re: Diagrams on the WWW ?

Re: Diagrams on the WWW ?

[Lars Lindqvist]

Paul and Michael,

There is perhaps no realistic alternative to LaTeX for writing mathematics 
today, but MathML is a language for the future and I like the visions and 
the goals associated with this language. I will not try to argue for MathML 
here because this is done in the specification (actually a draft) at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-MathML2-19991222. As discussed in Section 1.3.1 
(Layered Design of Mathematical Web Services) MathML provides the lower 
level of a two layer architecture where LaTeX would be a language (tool) at 
the higher level (generating MathML code).

There already exists several different tools for converting LaTeX to MathML 
so a straightforward solution would be to construct a converter also for 
some popular diagram specification language (package). Since MathML does not 
support the specification of  complicated labelled diagrams the output would 
be a mixture of MathML and e.g. VML (or SVG) which are markup languages for 
vector graphics. This would also be in accordance with Section 7.1.5.2 of 
the MathML specification.

So I suppose I have to reformulate my question from my first letter and ask 
whether there are any such tools or converters?

I do not know much about the PDF format. When I publish a document written 
in LaTeX on the web I usually generate a postscript version and a PDF 
version (generated using Adobe distiller).

Thanks for your replies.

Lars L
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

RE: Diagrams on the WWW ?

[Robert Harper]

MikTeX, a free TeX implementation for PC's (and possibly other platforms,
I'm not certain) comes with a dvi-to-pdf converter, called dvipdfm.  Use it
just like dvips, and you get pdf format.

Bob Harper

Re: Diagrams on the WWW ?

[Robert Tennent]

 > From: Michael Barr <barr@barrs.org>
 > 
 > I would suggest doing it in tex and then converting it to pdf, which is
 > quickly coming to be a standard for the web.  There are at least two ways
 > of doing tex --> pdf that cost no money.  There is something called
 > pdflatex.

Still beta I believe, but works well.

 > A second, not entirely
 > satisfactory is to use the ability of gsview to output pdf files.  You
 > choose print to disk and then you get a pdf file that can be read with the
 > Adobe reader.  
 > 
Best results are obtained by using type 1 fonts and the most recent version
of ghostscript, currently 5.97, or maybe 6.

Another possibility, which I've found gives the best results,
is to use a free program called dvipdfm:

http://odo.kettering.edu/dvipdfm/

Bob T.

Re: Diagrams on the WWW ?

[Michael Barr]

I would suggest doing it in tex and then converting it to pdf, which is
quickly coming to be a standard for the web.  There are at least two ways
of doing tex --> pdf that cost no money.  (You can also get Adobe
distiller, but that costs actual money.)  There is something called
pdflatex, that I have not used but it comes free with the tex distribution
from CTAN (it is essentially undocumented, so if you figure it out, I
would like to know about how it works.  A second, not entirely
satisfactory is to use the ability of gsview to output pdf files.  You
choose print to disk and then you get a pdf file that can be read with the
Adobe reader.  It is common practice to put a link to the free download of
the Adobe reader when you post a pdf file, but most users of the web
probably have it by now.

Michael Barr

Diagrams on the WWW ?

[Lars Lindqvist]

Hi,

My name is Lars Lindqvist and I wonder if there are any packages which makes 
it possible to include diagrams in documents on the WWW in a conveniant 
manner? What I have in mind are packages similar to the existing packages 
for the creation of diagrams in e.g. LaTex.

Very simple diagrams can probably be specified using the table construct in 
MathML but problems occur quite rapidly as the diagrams become more 
complicated. MathML is simply not intended for specification of such 
diagrams. See e.g. the last paragraph in section 7.1.5.2 of the MathML 
specification http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-MathML2-19991222:

" Finally, apart from the introduction of new glyphs, many of the situations 
where one might be inclined to use an image amount to some sort of labeled 
diagram. For example, knot diagrams, Venn diagrams, Dynkin diagrams, Feynman 
diagrams and complicated commutative diagrams all fall into this category. 
As such, their content would be better encoded via some combination of 
structured graphics and MathML markup. Because of the generality of the 
`labeled diagram' construction, the definition of a markup language to 
encode such constructions extends beyond the scope of the W3C Math activity. 
(See http://www.w3.org/Graphics for further W3C activity in this area.) "

Following this suggestion I have made some initial attemts to construct an 
XML markup language for diagrams. I have also written a XSL (Extensible 
Stylesheet Language) schema that transforms diagrams specified in this 
language to a VML (Vector Markup Language) specification which can be 
rendered by e.g. Internet Explorer 5. There is a lot of work involved in a 
project like this so I am really interested to hear about other attempts and 
experiences before I continue.

/Lars Lindqvist
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com