Re: HTML+ support for eqn & Postscript

N F Drakos ([email protected])
Fri, 18 Jun 1993 14:06:04 +0200


>We use (amongst other things) DECWrite, which deals with equations by
>embedding limited, math only, TeX code (actually stored in a separate
>file), and translating it to DECwrite's internal format for final
>display. It works well. DEC saw no reason to invent a new format, and
>given that TeX already exists, I see no point in reinventing it,
>either. Face it, the hard bit has been done - the browser author
>doesn't have to know what the Tex code *does*, simply hand the input to
>it and render the output. Yes, I know it's not trivial for browser
>authors, but my guess is that reinventing maths symbol processing for
>HTML would be worse. Do the TeX stuff in a separate process, if you
>like. Ghostscript takes this approach of separating viewer and processor, I
> believe.
>

I agree. We are taking this approach in a tex2html translator we are
currently building.
The idea is to translate into HTML as much as possible and include
the rest (pictures, equations, tables, etc.) as inlined images.
Then, an HTML viewer need only handle inlined images and allow text to
flow around them.

Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.