Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

[Phys-l] math symbols and brackets in web pages



Recently several people have reported (off-list) having
trouble viewing some of the equations in my web pages.
Here's the situation as I understand it:

A) The tools that I use (notably HeVeA) have recently
become much fancier. In particular, they can do an
impressive (albeit not perfect) job of typesetting
equations, including things like the big brackets
around matrices and multi-line fractions.

B) This has made me more motivated to use fancy equations
in my html pages, and less motivated to prepare pdf
versions of everything.

On MS platforms, it appears that if you are having trouble,
the fix is reasonably simple. My information about this is
secondhand and somewhat sketchy, since I don't do MS windows.
But here's what I've been told: There's a font issue on top
of a browser issue:

1) You need to have at least one font on your system that
provides the glyphs for the math symbols and brackets.
Note that you do not need to use this font as your
"standard" or "current" font; Firefox is clever about
looking for "substitute fonts" when needed; for more
about this, see
http://www.av8n.com/computer/htm/encoding.htm#sec-substitute-fonts

It appears that some MS systems already have such a font
installed, so you might want to skip to step (2) and come
back to this step if needed.

If you don't already have such a font, you can install
the code2000 font, which seems to have pretty good
coverage of math symbols and brackets. It's shareware,
so you can try it for free (and then pay $5.00).
http://www.code2000.net/

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_Unicode_fonts
for information about free unicode fonts.


2) You need to view the documents using the Firefox browser.

If this is not already on your system, you can install it
for free.

The MSIE is apparently hopeless for a number of reasons,
including the "substitute font" issue.