Del Wegener wrote:

> I have been fighting these same issues for a several years and I am
> convinced that the best method is to use images.

Hardly. Using images for such purposes are the last resort and always come 
with problems, even if you define them with CSS settings that make them 
scale according to font size and provide adequate alt attributes. For 
example, any text in an image has a specific shape which practically always 
differs from the one in text characters. An "a" in your image is different 
from an "a" in your text, which is bad if they are supposed to be same 
variale.

> You can see illustrations by looking at some of the examples on
> http://www.drdelmath.com/intermediate_algebra/chapter_summary/intermediate_algebra_chapter1_summary.htm

It should be easy to see some of the fundamental problems there.

It is not easy to find any example of the use of fraction bar there. I'm 
afraid you misunderstood the question, or the OP misunderstood what 
"fraction bar" means. It means a character resembling "/" but with different 
angle and properties, used to construct fractional numbers in a particular 
rendering, similar to that of "½".

There are some _characters_ such as "½" that you can use in documents. Even 
a character for 2/3 exists in Unicode and is relatively well supported by 
fonts (even in Arial). So they might be suitable if you really want 
fractions. You can write e.g. the vulgar fraction 2/3 as a character in HTML 
using the reference ⅅ. Check out Unicode resources such as 
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/ to find what's available.

For some notes on using HTML and CSS for presenting mathematical 
expressions, check
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/

There's no good approach to fraction slash issue, in cases where the vulgar 
fractions are not suitable. You would need to reduce the size of digits, 
which tends to make their lines too thin, and positioning the digits well 
with respect to the slash (whether you use "/" or the Unicode fraction slash 
character) in a cross-browser way might be mission impossible.

In the OP's document, I would worry more about issues like using the proper 
minus sign (−) instead of the ambiguous hyphen-minus "-". (On a very 
ambitious web page, you would even consider using CSS, e.g. the 
vertical-align property, to position a minus sign well in the vertical 
direction. It should be obvious that e.g. if a−x looks good, then 
A−X won't, since lowercase and uppercase letters would require 
different vertical position for the minus.)

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ 

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