# Latex for webpages - help wanted

1. Aug 6, 2004

### pervect

Staff Emeritus
The latex thread itself is getting long, and this question is enough different that I thought it deserved a thread of its own. I have some specific questions, I think they may be of some general interest as well.

Basically, the question is what is the best and/or easiest way to go from latex equations for short formulas to something that can be put into a webpage?

The ideal solution should work with all browsers - definitely both Internet Explorer and Mozilla - without plugins.

It seems to me that most websites use jpg's. .png's have been mentioned as another possibility.

The second question is how to generate them. I tried downloading the program Latex2Rtf that was recommended in the latex thread. Unfortunately, running included "friendly shell" only yields the error message "out of environment space". Attempting to run the program manually yields some sort of .rtf file, but viewing this file with either wordpad or with Mozilla does not give me a readable equation.

The particular equation that I'm using as a test case is

$$J = -{{\it xdot}}^{2}-{{\it ydot}}^{2}+{w}^{2} \left( {x}^{2}+{y}^{2} \right) +{\frac {2\,G{\it m1}}{\sqrt { \left( x+{\frac {{\it m2}\,d} {{\it m1}+{\it m2}}} \right) ^{2}+{y}^{2}}}}+{\frac {2\,G{\it m2}}{ \sqrt { \left( x-{\frac {{\it m1}\,d}{{\it m1}+{\it m2}}} \right) ^{2} +{y}^{2}}}}$$

If any of the formatting looks odd, it wasn't manually generated, but was the output of (an old version of) Maple's latex() command. It's not absolutely necessary that the conversion program be able to handle Maple's output, but it would definitely be nice.

I see that for some reason or other this formula gets truncated here, at least in the preview. My fplatex does apparently generate a good .dvi and .pdf file, though.

I've been struggling through the latex documentation trying to get my fplatex package to do the job, but I'm really not sure what needs to be done, so far I've had no success.

On a related note might be the best latex package to use. fplatex is hoging a lot of disk space, but what parts of it I've gotten to work seem to work very well. But I haven't gotten any of the web-related parts to work :-(.

BTW, this particular expression is for one of the invariants of the restricted three body problem, usually called the Jacobi intergal, though it could also be recognized by other names - it's basically a multiple of the energy function, which is the Hamiltonian of the problem expressed with different variables. Not that that matters to the specific question as hand, it's just some background info for anyone who is curious :-).

2. Aug 7, 2004

### Vern

Simply take a screen shot of your Latex created work and cut and paste into your graphics program. Paint Shop Pro 7 works great for this !

Vern

3. Aug 8, 2004

### pervect

Staff Emeritus
Thanks! This isn't the most elegant solution, perhaps, but it sounds like it should work, and I've been a bit frustrated that something so seemingly simple should eat up so much time.

4. Aug 8, 2004

### robphy

5. Aug 10, 2004

### chroot

Staff Emeritus
I have modified PF's code to be able to handle these extra-large images:

$$J = -{{\it xdot}}^{2}-{{\it ydot}}^{2}+{w}^{2} \left( {x}^{2}+{y}^{2} \right) +{\frac {2\,G{\it m1}}{\sqrt { \left( x+{\frac {{\it m2}\,d} {{\it m1}+{\it m2}}} \right) ^{2}+{y}^{2}}}}+{\frac {2\,G{\it m2}}{ \sqrt { \left( x-{\frac {{\it m1}\,d}{{\it m1}+{\it m2}}} \right) ^{2} +{y}^{2}}}}$$

- Warren