Subject: categories: Diagrams on the WWW ?

From: "Lars Lindqvist" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2000 02:29:44 CET

Hi,

My name is Lars Lindqvist and I wonder if there are any packages which makes 
it possible to include diagrams in documents on the WWW in a conveniant 
manner? What I have in mind are packages similar to the existing packages 
for the creation of diagrams in e.g. LaTex.

Very simple diagrams can probably be specified using the table construct in 
MathML but problems occur quite rapidly as the diagrams become more 
complicated. MathML is simply not intended for specification of such 
diagrams. See e.g. the last paragraph in section 7.1.5.2 of the MathML 
specification http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-MathML2-19991222:

" Finally, apart from the introduction of new glyphs, many of the situations 
where one might be inclined to use an image amount to some sort of labeled 
diagram. For example, knot diagrams, Venn diagrams, Dynkin diagrams, Feynman 
diagrams and complicated commutative diagrams all fall into this category. 
As such, their content would be better encoded via some combination of 
structured graphics and MathML markup. Because of the generality of the 
`labeled diagram' construction, the definition of a markup language to 
encode such constructions extends beyond the scope of the W3C Math activity. 
(See http://www.w3.org/Graphics for further W3C activity in this area.) "

Following this suggestion I have made some initial attemts to construct an 
XML markup language for diagrams. I have also written a XSL (Extensible 
Stylesheet Language) schema that transforms diagrams specified in this 
language to a VML (Vector Markup Language) specification which can be 
rendered by e.g. Internet Explorer 5. There is a lot of work involved in a 
project like this so I am really interested to hear about other attempts and 
experiences before I continue.

/Lars Lindqvist
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From: Michael Barr <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 17:38:52 -0500 (EST)

I would suggest doing it in tex and then converting it to pdf, which is
quickly coming to be a standard for the web.  There are at least two ways
of doing tex --> pdf that cost no money.  (You can also get Adobe
distiller, but that costs actual money.)  There is something called
pdflatex, that I have not used but it comes free with the tex distribution
from CTAN (it is essentially undocumented, so if you figure it out, I
would like to know about how it works.  A second, not entirely
satisfactory is to use the ability of gsview to output pdf files.  You
choose print to disk and then you get a pdf file that can be read with the
Adobe reader.  It is common practice to put a link to the free download of
the Adobe reader when you post a pdf file, but most users of the web
probably have it by now.

Michael Barr