Web Design

Overview: This page contains tips for the presentation of scientific content on the web. The first section deals with displaying mathematical equations using HTML.

Typesetting complex mathematical content is a challenge in itself. There is a program that has been invented to tackle this task- tex. Most authors in the scientific community use tex or its cousins latex and pdflatex to create documents containing mathematical notation.

Displaying mathematical content on a web page is slightly more challenging. This is because the web markup language HTML is not particularly well suited for typesetting equations. There are however some workarounds available. A brief discussion on this topic is included here on a site by Ian Hutchinson. He also provides a program to convert tex documents into html documents. It is called tth and can be downloaded here. The program is self-contained and can be compiled e.g. using the gcc compiler.

TTH can be used to convert tex documents that have already been successfully compiled using tex. Note that the auxiliary files generated by tex are required. TTH generates an html document and attempts to translate mathematical constructs using native HTML characters. As such, the equations are text i.e. they are searchable and they can be magnified by the reader like ordinary text. The program can also translate the table of content and the bibliography section of a tex document.

I have used tth to translate most of the equations in the modelling resources pages of this site. A sample is included below:

⎡ ⎣ ∂ ∂t ± β k 0 c ϵp ∂ ∂z ⎤ ⎦ ET±= ⎡ ⎣ i 2 ω0 ⎛ ⎝ c2 ϵp ⎞ ⎠ ∂2 ∂x2 + iω0 2 δϵa ϵp Γ− β k0 c ϵp α 2 ⎤ ⎦ ET±+ iω0 2 Γ ϵ0ϵp PT±.

(1.1)

VERDICT: Very useful program. Completes lightning fast and (mostly) fails graciously by just leaving out content it does not manage to convert. Tends to generate nested HTML structures that are somewhat difficult to edit. To view html files generated by tth the browser has to be CSS enabled (and most browsers are).