A Simple Way To Display Math In HTML

Disclaimer: this doesn't work in internet explorer.

Here is an example: What familar space is the quotient -complex of a 2-simplex obtained by identifying the edges and , preserving the ordering of vertices.
Most people accept that MathML is something that future generations might enjoy but is not really an acceptable means of communicating mathematics over the web today. The typical hacky solution is to use TeX to generate images for each of the equations in the document and then link to them. This works fairly well but creates the problem of having to maintain a massive directory of such images; for people replying to comments in mathematics blogs this means they must have a server running which can host all these images and must continue hosting that server for as long as they wish their comments to be readable.

A fix to this is to embed images of equations directly in the html using data:URIs.

This is a script which aids the user in doing this.
The output above was created by running webeqn on this input: What familar space is the quotient $\Delta$-complex of a 2-simplex $[v_0, v_1, v_2]$ obtained by identifying the edges $[v_0, v_1]$ and $[v_1, v_2]$, preserving the ordering of vertices.


To use the script you must have ruby, identify (comes with ImageMagick), latex and dvipng (comes standard with most modern latex distributions, in particular in fink's 10.4 tetex package) installed on your system.

The input should be HTML marked up with LaTeX equations surrounded by dollar signs. The output will replace the equations with images tags.