tech note: Information about special character support in various browsers

[cmeador]

I wrote this to explain some issues we have been dealing with at work. The short backstory is that we have content formatted with HTML that gets published online and in print. Our customers don't always have the latest and greatest computers so the online delivery has to have low system requirements. The content is transformed into XML for the

Comments

[kdknigga]

Wikipedia has a system that will automatically replace special characters with png images in case a system doesn't know how to display them. This is done specifically for math stuff.

If you have a wikipedia account, you can adjust this system to your liking under the "Math" tab on the "my preferences" page.

I don't know if this generates the image on the fly (which is 100% possible), or if it just substitutes a pre-generated image when appropriate, but it may be something to look into.

[cmeador]

The forums on sosmath.com have a dynamic LaTeX interpreter that processes [tex][/tex] tags and produces GIFs. We considered doing something like that, there are a lot of interesting ways to implement a system like that for online delivery. It's not quite as easy to work out the translation into InDesign though. InDesign is woefully unprepared to typeset math notation without expensive plugins, and as far as I can tell there is no plugin that would automatically typeset from LaTeX or MathML.

Maybe if we could get a system that dynamically produces a lightweight GIF for online and a EPS or PDF version to embed in InDesign, that would be nice. It's just kinda lame that InDesign can't render directly from LaTeX or MathML.

[kdknigga]

Can you not typeset the whole thing in TeX, bypassing InDesign all together? Then convert TeX to PS to PDF, and I know of no printer that doesn't love PDF (actually PS may be fine, too).