What's the best way to write Mathematical Equations on the Web?

Answer 1

I've been using the LaTeX plugin for the Confluence wiki to write equations on the web (well, on the intranet). It displays an image in the web browser, but you can still see the LaTeX source if you edit the page.

I don't know what you're using to host the web site, but you could maybe use a similar approach: embed the LaTeX source in the page, and render it as an image for the web browser.

Answer 2

LaTeX is use extensively already on the net and in academia to render equations.

A great example of this is wikipedia have a look at this page for 1 example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latitude

I know this is a generlisation but: Using images is a viable way to achieve many things on the web in a browser compatible way - provided you provision for some of the shortcomings. ( eg. Google Maps, Rounded Corners, graphs, advanced typography )

Also 'dated' could be interpreted as 'tried, tested and feature complete'

and thanks for point out sIFR - something i'm going to look at later, i already have a list of things to explore with it, such as printing? ( html + images can do this pretty well, can sIFR?....)

Answer 3

MathTran is the nicest solution that I've come across to this:

http://www.mathtran.org/

Answer 4

iTex2Img is the best one what I've ever used. Here is a screenshot with an example.

Answer 5

I have been using borderless tables with merged cells in my website to display math equations. It works excellent for most equations. However, since the markup is usually a bit complex, it would be time consuming in case of hard core mathematics websites.

Here is the code:

<style type="text/css">
  table.math{font:17px georgia, times, serif;border-collapse:collapse;border:none;}
  td.a{text-align:center;}
  td.b{padding:0 2px;}
  td.c{border-top:1px solid #505050;border-left:1px solid #505050;border-bottom:1px solid #505050;}
  td.d{border-top:1px solid #505050;border-right:1px solid #505050;border-bottom:1px solid #505050;}
  td.e{text-align:center;border-top:1px solid #505050;}
</style>
<table class="math">
  <tr>
    <td class="a">1</td>
    <td class="b" rowspan="2">&times;</td>
    <td class="c" rowspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
    <td class="a">8</td>
    <td class="b" rowspan="2">+</td>
    <td class="a">1</td>
    <td class="d" rowspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td class="e">x + 2</td>
    <td class="e">x + 2</td>
    <td class="e">x &minus; 1</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Here is the output of the above code:

Answer 6

I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output.