MAM2000 (Info)

If the equations on the previous page don't look right, please read on.

Mathematical notation is quite difficult to represent in HTML; the language simply doesn't have the control required to lay out complicated expressions. There are several approaches to dealing with this problem. One is to make iamges of all mathematical equations, but this makes for slow-loading pages, and the iamges don't resize if you change the font size used to display the page. A similar method uses Java applets to typeset the mathematics on the fly.

The approach taken here is to use the Symbol font and HTML tables to lay out the mathematics. This has the advantage of fast downloads and gives the reader the ability to resize the mathematical equations, but has the disadvantage of not being able to represent everything well.

In order for this method to work, you must do the following:

• Enable page-specified fonts:

  In Netscape 4, this can be done via the Preferences dialog box (under the Edit menu) by selecting the Appearance/Fonts item, and activating the checkbox for page-specific fonts.

  In Internet Explorer 4, go to the Preferences panel and select the Web-Browser/Web-Content item, and check the "Allow page to specify fonts" item.

• Set the character encoding to MacRoman or Western(Mac) if you are using a Macintosh:

  In Netscape 4, use the View/Character-Set menu to select MacRoman. This will be reset each time you open a new page, so you might want to use the View/Character-Set/Set-Default item in order to make MacRoman the default encoding.

  In Internet Explorer 4, Use the View/Character-Set to select Western (Mac). This will stay active until you change it.

Internet Explorer 4 on the Macintosh doesn't seem to handle the symbol font correctly. We have tried to reduce the use of the Symbol font, but there are some times when it was required. We do not know of a work-around for this. Internet Explorer 3 does not seem to have this problem.

Here are some examples to see if you have things set properly:

This should be the greek letter "pi":		p
This should be a square root sign:		Ö
This should be a plus with a circle around it:		Å

Math Awareness Month 2000 Last modified: 27 Mar 2000 19:40:34 Comments to: thomas_banchoff@brown.edu Hosted by: The Math Forum