- From: Michael Kohlhase <Michael_Kohlhase@asuka.mt.cs.cmu.edu>
- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 09:36:35 -0500
- To: www-math@w3.org
Dear all, I just saw this posting on comp.text.tex, and it seemed relevant to this list. Michael ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Michael Kohlhase, Office: Newell Simon Hall 4623 Adjunct Associate Professor 5000 Forbes Avenue, School of Computer Science Pittsburgh, Pa 15213-3891, USA. Carnegie Mellon University tel/fax: +1 412 268 5749/6298 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kohlhase e-mail: <kohlhase+@cs.cmu.edu> -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- Forwarded Message Forwarded: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 09:34:25 -0500 Forwarded: "CCaps Developers <+dist+~sutner/dl/ccaps-dev.dl@andrew.cmu.edu> " Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!newsfeed.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.ece.cmu.edu!usenet01.sei.cmu.edu!news.cis.ohio-state.edu!news.ems.psu.edu!news.cse.psu.edu!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.uchicago.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!panix!forkosh From: John Forkosh <john@invalid.com> Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: announcing mimetex Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:05:50 +0000 (UTC) Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Lines: 60 Message-ID: <ar2uvu$n33$1@reader1.panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com X-Trace: reader1.panix.com 1037369150 23651 166.84.1.3 (15 Nov 2002 14:05:50 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:05:50 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: tinx 1.2.12 Xref: asuka.mt.cs.cmu.edu comp.text.tex:150816 History: Around the middle of September I got some very helpful advice in comp.text.tex about using TeX fonts in an external program, and around the end of October uploaded gpl'ed mimeTeX to ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/mimetex/mimetex.zip Note: a nasty bug in its array command is fixed by replacing mimetex.c and mimetex.h with the two files in http://www.forkosh.com/mimefix.zip Brief description: MimeTeX parses LaTeX math expressions, emitting either mime xbitmaps or gif images of them, which can be used in html documents in the form, e.g., <img src="../cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?f(x)=\int_{-\infty}^xe^{-t^2}dt" border=0 align=absmiddle> allowing you to embed math directly in html, which reduces the need for lots of external gif images and makes your html documents more readable and easily maintained. An online demo and tutorial is at http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html MimeTeX isn't primarily meant for latex2html-like tasks where you're maintaining native (La)TeX documents that are later redistributed in several formats, including html. Rather, mimeTeX is primarily meant to help maintain native html documents containing math. In this sense it's a kind of "lightweight" alternative to MathML, with the advantage that mimeTeX preserves (La)TeX syntax. Similar non-MathML packages, including textogif http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/textogif/textogif.html and gladTeX, http://www.math.uio.no/~martingu/gladtex/ require setup procedures that use TeX to help generate external gif (or png) images of your equations, which are later included in your html document as it's being rendered. MimeTeX, as far as I know, is the only such non-MathML package that has its own built-in rendering engine, entirely independent of TeX, and therefore requires no setup procedure or external images whatsoever. It renders realtime, on-the-fly images directly from your LaTeX math embedded in html documents. Philosophy: Widespread use of MathML will eventually dilute the population of LaTeX-aware users, muddying LaTeX's future. (La)TeX is more than "TeX The Program"; TeX is its syntax. Knuth produced a test suite that validates any program claiming to be TeX, so no one version of the code is particularly important. It's the syntax that's important. (La)TeX will survive so long as a significant user population continues to use this syntax. MathML poses a threat to LaTeX's syntax in the html/xml market, so it's important to provide some LaTeX-compliant alternative. MimeTeX is meant to be a prototype alternative. It's probably too small and kludgey for a final solution, but it demonstrates feasibility, and is full-featured enough to measure potential interest in LaTeX-compliant alternatives to MathML. - -- John Forkosh ( mailto: j@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh ) ------- End of Forwarded Message
Received on Friday, 15 November 2002 09:36:45 UTC