Putting documents on the web

It is rapidly becoming easier and more common to post documents on the web, such as course syllabi, homework assignments, research articles, etc.  This is a brief description of how to do so.

First, you need an account on a computer that is configured as a web server.  In March 2000, BGSU began setting up space for personal web pages on a machine called personal.bgsu.edu.  Visit your my.bgsu.edu page to add an account on personal. In the mathematics and statistics department, the web server is called www-math.bgsu.edu, which is one of the Silicon Graphics UNIX machines we have.  See Gordon Wade  for an account.

Second, you ought to set up a basic web page for yourself.  One good way to do this is to find someone else's web page that you like, save it to your computer (using File, Save As on most browsers), name the file index.html (the default name for home pages), use an editor such as Netscape Composer or BBEedit to make changes to the file, and then use a program such as fetch or ftp to transfer it to the computer where you have a web account.  Typically such files should go in a directory called public_html.

Converting Word, Excel, and other documents to PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a good format to have a document in, because they can be displayed on any computer which has Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, which includes virtually all computers at BGSU.

If you have a Word or Excel document (or another sort of Mac/PC document), follow the directions on the ITS page  Making a PDF file .  This is very easy!  It roughly amounts to changing the printer to PDF Writer.

The  June 2000 ITS Bulletin has a segment on using Adobe Acrobat to put files on the web in pdf format.  You may also wish to refer to  Adobe Acrobat is your friend and  A guide to PDF files , which is likely to be the best resource.

In some cases, particularly for users of TeX and LaTeX, it may be necessary to take a longer router to creating PDF files.  The basic idea is to first convert to postscript format, and then convert to PDF.

Converting to postscript

If you have a Word or Excel document (or another sort of PC/Mac document), you can usually save it in postscript format by choosing File, Print, change Destination to File (instead of Printer), specify a nice filename like nice.ps, and Save.

TeX and LaTeX will typically produce postscript files, perhaps in addition to .dvi files.

Converting to pdf

As far as I can tell, pdf is not very different from postscript.  On a PC or Mac, there is a program called Acrobat Distiller which you can use.  To do so on a Macintosh, simply drag the icon for the .ps file onto the icon for Distiller.  It will automatically produce a .pdf file.  On a PC, I have had success double clicking the icon for the .ps file.

On the department's UNIX machines, there is a utility called ps2pdf.  To use it, upload the .ps file to www-math.bgsu.edu, then telnet to www-math.bgsu.edu,  then type ps2pdf filename.ps
 

Now transfer the .pdf files to the computer where your web pages are.  You should provide links from your index.html file to the .pdf file(s).  The format for such links, in html, is
<A HREF="filename.pdf">Text of link</A>

Maple

Maple does a good job of converting mathematics to .gif files for display on the web. John Gresser's web page has some nice examples.

latex2html

A few years ago a package called latex2html was a pretty good way to convert LaTeX source files directly to html format.  The package still works, but the mathematics output is pretty grainy, and the conversion process is slow.  Compare this image  to this image , produced by Maple. The difference is more apparent at 4 times the size:  versus . Still, you may wish to consult the  web pages for latex2html.

Subscripts and superscripts

If you want to type some modest mathematical notation in an html document, you may find the example below useful:

ht = - (hn hxxx)x - (hm hx)x

The source code for this is:

<center>
<p>
<i>
h<sub>t</sub> = - (h<sup>n</sup> h<sub>xxx</sub>)<sub>x</sub> - (h<sup>m</sup> h<sub>x</sub>)<sub>x</sub>
</i>
</p>
</center>

Special characters

Here are a few sites listing codes for special characters:
 Special HTML characters
 The HTML Document Character Set  including .gif files for integrals and square roots
 Entity References Test Document

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