LateXSL
on-the-fly
LaTeX
to HTML converter
You have seen LaTeX to HTML converters before. What’s new about this one?
With the View Source menu item in your browser, look at the source of one of the XSLT examples below. You will see that the LaTeX is embedded directly into the HTML!
XSLT (better browsers only) |
pre-transformed (any modern browser) |
---|---|
LateXML overview | LateXML overview |
some LATEX characters | some LATEX characters |
some LATEX arrays | some LATEX arrays |
some LATEX decoration | some LATEX decoration |
One advantage to the web page author is that, if they are familiar with LaTeX, they can put their formulas directly into a web page. The LateXSL system works out the formatting.
For a reader, LateXSL affords several advantages over other common technologies
- Output appears as text in the browser window. The output therefore looks better, because it is independent of resolution, and it fits better with the fonts on the users system.
- The output can be copied and searched as text.
- If the text is a little to small for comfortable reading, the reader can just use their browser to magnify it. It all scales beautifully.
- Uses only a modern web browser (no need for special LaTeX software.)
What about MathML? That’s a wonderful standard.
- MathML is prohibitively difficult to type. An author will only use it if it is somehow automatically generated. There is software to do this, but that is another step. If the author later wants to alter a formula, it may be very hard to get it right.
- Web browser support for MathML remains scarce. MSIE doesn’t support it directly. Opera has recently announced support in their upcoming release. In Mozilla, it is available only in special builds, and requires third-party fonts to be installed.
In principle, LateXSL could output MathML for the browser to display. At this time, it simply isn’t practical.