I am rather embarrassed to ask this question, but it has been bothering me for a while. So, displaying my complete ignorance of the most basic principles of LaTeX and HTML in one fell swoop, here goes.
In MiKTeX, a user has the option of selecting A4 paper or 81/2 by 11 paper as the default paper size.
Why would it be impossible to define a computer screen as the default "paper"? That would require building an interface that would allow the computer to "see" the paper, this I understand, but would that not be a great deal easier than trying to convert LaTeX to HTML or MathML, or XHTML, none of which do the job of displaying math nearly as well as LaTeX does?
Please don't misunderstand. I think PDF and DVI documents are great. They do exactly what I want, and they allow for the option of printing, as well as viewing on the screen. But I am getting quite a lot of pressure to find a way of publishing directly to the Web, and even the best HTML translators are severely limited, so I have been dreaming of another way. I know if it were easy, it would already have been done, but I would love to know why it isn't possible.
Thanks for you patience with what must be a foolish query
Jilly
General ⇒ A dumb question
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A dumb question
I don't really understand what your question is.
Can you set LaTeX to output something the same dimensions as a computer screen? Of course. Packages like Beamer are made for using LaTeX to create things that are displayed on a computer screen, or at least a projector screen. It gets a little tricky if you focus just on a screen, since people have screens of different dimensions--projectors are fairly similar to one another, but monitors aren't. Still, you could use the geometry package to make your output pages have whatever dimensions you wanted.
But that has nothing to do with the file format.
The advantage of HTML and web browsers isn't that the output is made for a certain computer screen, but that it's made to reflow and adjust to whatever window size it's given, which varies not just from device to device, but on the same device if people resize a window, or change the font size on the fly.
LaTeX was originally made for print publications, and is designed to *output* a fixed, non-reflowable size (DVI/PDF). What that size is can vary, and can be the same dimensions as a computer screen if you like, but it isn't made to reflow/readjust on the fly. But this allows it to find such things as the optimal page and paragraph layout, completely missing from just about any HTML renderer I've seen out there.
But that doesn't mean that a program couldn't exist that would take .tex source code and do with what your web browser does with HTML, whether it converts it to HTML along the way or not. People are working on such software; nothing is perfected yet, but I don't think it'll be too long. Once MathML gets wider support, I imagine the quality of TeX <-> HTML/MathML converters will increase dramatically.
In the meantime, I don't see what the problem is with publishing on the Web in PDF format. Nearly everyone has the ability to read PDF documents, and they are searchable in search engines, etc.
Can you set LaTeX to output something the same dimensions as a computer screen? Of course. Packages like Beamer are made for using LaTeX to create things that are displayed on a computer screen, or at least a projector screen. It gets a little tricky if you focus just on a screen, since people have screens of different dimensions--projectors are fairly similar to one another, but monitors aren't. Still, you could use the geometry package to make your output pages have whatever dimensions you wanted.
But that has nothing to do with the file format.
The advantage of HTML and web browsers isn't that the output is made for a certain computer screen, but that it's made to reflow and adjust to whatever window size it's given, which varies not just from device to device, but on the same device if people resize a window, or change the font size on the fly.
LaTeX was originally made for print publications, and is designed to *output* a fixed, non-reflowable size (DVI/PDF). What that size is can vary, and can be the same dimensions as a computer screen if you like, but it isn't made to reflow/readjust on the fly. But this allows it to find such things as the optimal page and paragraph layout, completely missing from just about any HTML renderer I've seen out there.
But that doesn't mean that a program couldn't exist that would take .tex source code and do with what your web browser does with HTML, whether it converts it to HTML along the way or not. People are working on such software; nothing is perfected yet, but I don't think it'll be too long. Once MathML gets wider support, I imagine the quality of TeX <-> HTML/MathML converters will increase dramatically.
In the meantime, I don't see what the problem is with publishing on the Web in PDF format. Nearly everyone has the ability to read PDF documents, and they are searchable in search engines, etc.