----- Forwarded message from Kristen Lanum -----
Hello! We are trying to render the symbols for Xbar and square root in
a statistics manual, which will primarily be used by staff using
Internet Explorer 5. Is there any way to render these symbols for the
web other than making them into graphics? I had seen a few past
postings on this subject but I was wondering if anyone has found a
better solution.
----- End of forwarded message from Kristen Lanum -----
This did not sound like a query likely to generate a lot of
controversy when I first read it!-)
IMO HTML was intended to provide online hyperlinks in simple text
documents. Now that the WWW has become widely popular, people are
trying to make it do all sorts of other things. I think the general
rule of thumb is that eventually HTML will do anything you want, but
you may have to wait a while for your particular thing to become part
of the standard. In the meantime, various solutions may be
implemented and may work on various browsers on various platforms.
So, all the things people have posted may in fact be correct for some
particular setup.
If you want a high level of control over output and access to every
font and symbol in the known universe, I suggest Adobe Acrobat. To
read your documents people will need the free reader from Adobe.com.
To MAKE documents you will need to buy the full Acrobat package, which
is expensive for an individual, but reasonable for even a small office
or an individual who can qualify for academic pricing. (I paid for my
copies.) You create the documents with whatever you would use to create
a paper document and then use Acrobat to convert the result into a
so-called PDF file. This has been a godsend for me as I have fifteen
years of mathematical documents. It takes a while for Acrobat (and
its reader) to load, but then a few seconds to convert a few pages.
The results are VASTLY superior to anything that claims to convert
existing documents to HTML. At one time, Acrobat documents were large
and slow to download. Now they are much more efficient than HTML
created by Microsoft products. It is also very platform independent.
Indeed, my stuff was created in DOS, is processed by Acrobat for
Windows, posted on a Unix webserver, and downloaded by my studetns who
are using iMacs. They print it out and it looks virtually identical
to my decade old DOS printout.
If you have Acrobat Reader (or the plug-in for your browser) you can
see a sample at my web page at
http://mathpc04.plymouth.edu
Go to site information and ask to see the sample. It came as a demo
page for the EXP word processor. I'm probably violating some
copyright law posting it, but I hope the EXP people will forgive me as
it is great advertising for their product as well. (I would describe
it as a Microsoft Works level word processor that does math
ridiculously easily.) It was originally posted for internal use only
as we write proposals for new hardware and software.
_
| | Robert W. Hayden
| | Department of Mathematics
/ | Plymouth State College MSC#29
| | Plymouth, New Hampshire 03264 USA
| * | Rural Route 1, Box 10
/ | Ashland, NH 03217-9702
| ) (603) 968-9914 (home)
L_____/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
fax (603) 535-2943 (work)http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
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