User Guide

Chapter 6: Creating Web Pages Containing Equations

Last printed 8/20/2001 9:40 AM

Creating Web Pages with Other Authoring

Programs

You can also create Web pages containing equations using more traditional Web

page editors. However, you’ll run into many of the problems that MathPage

solves: no baseline alignment of inline equations, low-quality printing etc.

Other Terms

Some HTML authoring

applications use the

term Import instead of

Insert, and Graphic

instead of Image.

Sometimes an HTML editor is necessary though, and this section describes how

to work with such tools. Most graphical Web authoring programs have an Insert

Image command that you can use to place an equation GIF file on a Web page.

First create a GIF file for each equation using MathType’s Save As command,

and then insert them into the page as needed. Consult your HTML editor’s

manual for details. Tutorial 15 and Chapter 5 contain more information on

creating GIF files using MathType.

Customizing MathType’s Generated HTML

For most Web applications, the HTML code generated by your HTML editor

when you insert a graphic will work just fine. However, if you need to surround

the HTML <IMG> tag with more sophisticated HTML code, you can make use of

MathType’s “Copy HTML to clipboard” feature in the Web and GIF Preferences

dialog. This feature allows you to set MathType up to copy an HTML code

fragment to the clipboard every time you save a GIF file. This HTML code

fragment can contain specialized code of your own design in order to make use

of features like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or to get around limitations in your

HTML editor. See MathType’s online help for details.

Baseline Adjustment in HTML

Unfortunately, Web browsers don’t automatically handle baseline adjustment of

inline equations. This means that your inline equations will not align themselves

with the baseline of the surrounding text. We hope that this situation will

improve in the future. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can help, but a solution that

works in all browsers is not yet available. MathPage handles this situation, so if

this is important to you, we suggest you author in Word and use MathType’s

Export to MathPage command.

Creating Web Pages Using Adobe Acrobat

Another way to create documents for the Web is to create them in Adobe’s

Portable Document Format (PDF). This is the format used by the Adobe Acrobat

reader and browser plug-in, which are freely available for many different

platforms (see www.adobe.com/acrobat).

Chapter 5 contains more information on using MathType with Adobe Acrobat.