Downloading And Viewing

To download a file, click on its icon. The file size is given to the right.

All files are ZIPped. These can be expanded using Aladdin StuffIt Expander which can be downloaded free for Macintosh or Windows. On UNIX I would expect them to gunzip fine, but you never know.

• To read PDF files you need Adobe Acrobat Reader version 3 or later. Version 4 is freely downloadable from Adobe for Macintosh, UNIX, and Windows.
• To read DVI files you need a DVI reader (obviously). These are supplied with installations of LaTeX. On the Macintosh I recommend OzTeX. For UNIX and Windows you will have to find something for yourself. If you could recommed something, please mail me.

If DVI files are a problem (please mail me to tell me if they are) then I shall begin converting to PDF.

A useful utility is GhostScript, a PostScript interpreter. This allows you to view PostScript files and print them on a non-PostScript printer. It also distills PDF files from PostScript files.

Maths On The Web

The Web, or rather HTML, is primarily for text markup. As such using the Internet to display maths is always going to be an uphill struggle.
The combination of HTML 4 and CSS 2 (get the specifications from W3C) greatly improve text and graphic display sophistication, but sadly not so for maths.

Despite the advances in HTML 4, HTML is still limited to displaying ASCII text. Displaying maths on the Web is often achieved by turning equations into images. Clearly this is not a satisfactory solution.
In an attempt to solve this, W3C) has produced the MathML specification, which is not supported in any browsers. MathML is an implementation of XML designed for displaying maths on the Web.

Unfortunately, however easy MathML is to write (it appears not to be) it introduces yet another markup language for mathematics. Clearly the best solution would be for browsers to be able to set TeX and LaTeX, or display DVIs.
As this isn't going to happen, it seems that a number of different people have attempted to write Java applets for viewing the DVI files which TeX and LaTeX produce as output. Worth mention are

• Maths Browser is an applet which appears to process LaTeX for viewing. Not much information is available on the accompanying web pages.
• iDVI is a Java DVI viewer that can be used as an applet in a web page. Unfortunately it requires over 8MB of fonts to be stored on the server with it. Also, it only installs on UNIX machines, so I can’t test it off-line on my Mac.