[thelist] Displaying scientific and mathematical notation (was: When the mix of visual appearance and meaning goes really bad)
Sam-I-Am
sam at sam-i-am.com
Fri May 7 18:03:02 CDT 2004
> Regarding the special cases such as taxonomical names and vectors, I'm
> soon beginning a project which will require scientific notation and
> equations that actually look like fractions, and not like "v = d/t". I'm
> hoping to find a variation on xml (MathML?) for the data, but still not
> sure exactly how to present it to a browser...
>
> Any suggestions welcome?
> joe
We had to look into this for a project recently. MathML is all ready for
you, but the browser support for it is not.
Basically you'll need to make gifs. We did investigate making a flash
viewer for the MathML content and had some success parsing the xml
fragment and rendering. But there's a LOT to this and not at all for the
faint hearted.
There are various mostly commercial plugins as I recall. My father is a
physicist and I ran this by him at the time, and he said that for the
stuff he used, gif images were mostly used to present the notation on
the web, and if a page is heavy with notation, a pdf or LaTex file
offered instead. Not good I know..
Unless anyone has any other suggestions?
Sam
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