MathML on The Web

• What is MathML?

           MathML, or Mathematics Makeup Language, is Mathematical application of XML, which stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is based on the same technology as HTML, a tag-like structure, but it helps managing information better. Therefore, MathML consists of many tags just like HTML, but all those tags are for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content.

• What is MathML for?

           MathML is for mathematics to be received, processed, and served over the internet. For example, right now when you view any equation, you see the whole equation as a bitmap image. With MathML, the same equation is recognized by the browser ( it has to be a browser that supports XML like Mozilla). When you click on the equation, it shows the content and structure of that equation. For our computational physics group, we would like people to access our information as much as possible. Therefore, MathML will help the mathematics accessible to all users even the disabilities.

• How can a MathML file be created?

          Because of a tag-like structure, a MathML file is really bulky, an example. Therefore, to create MathML, we need to use a converter program. There are many converter programs converting HTML, Tex, or Latex file to XML file. Then, you need a browser like Mozilla to view the XML file.THe following is how to create MathML file using Tex4Moz converter.

          Firstly, create your Tex or Latex document. If you have wins98 OS, I recommend using WinEdt, which is a shareware editor to create Tex/Latex document. If you create your Tex/Latex document another way, you still need to download and install MiKTeX 1.20 These instructions are for installing Tex4Moz on wins98. For other types of OS, you can follow the instruction on Tex4Moz homepage. The instruction on installing Tex4Moz from its homepage is not quite completed telling you all the things. The followings are steps of how I installed Tex4Moz on wins98.

1. Download Tex4Moz by following the first second steps on an installation instructions page.
2. Modify tex4ht.env and moz4ht.env by replacing the lines starting with tTFMPATHS, with lines redirecting the path to the tfm files of Tex and Latex. In my case, I use MiKTeX 1.2, which has tfm files in c:/texmf/fonts/tfm, so I changed the line to tc:\texmf\fonts\tfm\!

          Do the same for moz4ht.env file. These two files have to locate in c:\tex4ht directory.

    3.  Then, rename ht.tab, htlatex.tab, httex.tab, mztex.tab, mzlatex.tab to ht.bat, htlatex.bat etc. All these files have to be in c:\tex4ht directory

    4. Add c:\tex4ht to c:\AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

    5. Move tex4ht.sty and all the '.4ht' files to c:\tex4ht directory.

    6. Then, you have to copy a whole 'ams' directory from

       c:\localtexmf\fonts\tfm\ams to c:\texmf\fonts\tfm\public\ams

       You also need to copy some extra fonts from

       c:\localtexmf\fonts\tfm\public\cm\*.* to c:\texmf\fonts\tfm\public\cm\*.*

    7. You should be able to compile the Tex4Moz by now. To compile the program, download the test.tex file and try it out. If your program is installed correctly, it should give a bunch of files and text.xml as outputs after you typed this

       c:\tex4ht\mzlatex test.tex

       If not, you can try this command and look at errors that the program complains on the screen.

       c:\tex4ht\command /y /c mzlatex test

You can view the test.xml file by Mozilla.

• The Next Step

          Tex4Moz does not provide completely perfect .xml output. It complains when the Latex file is getting more complicated, so some extra work is required. Click here for some of David Vediner work improving the .xml file.