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Embedded Graphics

One way of displaying mathematics on the web is by the use of embedded graphics inside Html documents. Mathematical equations are represented by graphical images (e.g. gifs) which all browsers display without difficulties. Formulae can be viewed in their original rendering, without the browser requiring additional fonts or external viewing programs.

Nevertheless, these images display low resolutions and printing them results in poor quality documents. There are also problems with alignment and sizing. Because graphical images are generally slow to download, documents might take more time than desired to be rendered. Since we are only dealing with images, the equations are not editable. No modifications can be done on them. For the same reasons, they are not reusable, because semantic value is completely lost.

This method is widespread but not very appreciated. In the Html 3.0 draft, the World Wide Web Consortium specifically states its intention of helping users avoid the use of inline images to display equations.

This is the approach used by programs such as LATEX 2Html [9] or TEX 4ht [13] which can convert LATEX documents to Html format for direct insertion into the Internet. LATEX markup is translated into Html while mathematical equations are converted into graphical images. It is worth noting however, that there exist programs such as TtM [14] which translate the mathematical sections directly into MathML presentation markup .


next up previous contents
Next: Graphical Page Display Up: Mathematics and the Internet Previous: Html and Mathematics   Contents
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2000-05-01