Putting TeX on the Web

While TeX is a great way of writing and printing mathematics, most computers dont speak TeX. If you wish to make your latest research paper available to your colleagues or the professional mathematical community, putting a .tex or .dvi file on your web page is OK, but if you want your students to be able to read your lecturer notes and example sheets, you will need to convert you document into something that most computers in the world can be expected to understand.

My Recommendation

Each of these will Publish your document as an Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) file, which by convention has a filename ending in .pdf. This is a sufficiently standard document format that if someone else's computer can't read it you can consider it their problem and not yours.

Generating a .pdf file from TeX

Generate your .dvi file by running TeX or LaTeX in the usual way. Build a PostScript file with dvips, but say that you want it to be optimized for a PDF printer:

dvips -Ppdf filename.dvi -o filename.ps
Now use ps2pdf to generate a PDF file from the PostScript file: ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 filename.ps filename.pdf (if you don't specify the paper size, it may produce a PDF file for American LETTER paper).

You now have a file filename.pdf which is an Adobe Acrobat file.

Publishing your .pdf file

Put this file into your web home page directory ~/public_html (or a sub-directory) and make a link to it from your personal home page ~/public_html/index.html. And don't forget to run

chmod a+r filename so that everyone can read your file.

Other ways of putting TeX files on the web

PostScript

HTML

MathML

MathML is the standard for publishing mathematics on the internet. We have had to wait several years for a browser which supports MathML, but Mozilla and Netscape 7 have support for MathML, and a MathML plugin for Internet Explorer is available at http://www.dessci.com/webmath/mathplayer/. Although these require different sorts of document (one uses XHTML, the other uses MathML islands in an HTML document), people can now read MathML if you put it on the web, so you can start to think about making your work available as a MathML document.

The Mozilla MathML project http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/ have links to MathML samples, and tools for generating it from TeX (you aren't expected to write directly in MathML, as it is very verbose).

http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/ http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/cmathml.xml

Other ways of producing Acrobat files

dvipdf

Converts dvi files to PDF.

ps2pdf

Converts PostScript files to PDF.

pdftex and pdflatex

Generate PDF files directly from TeX.

These do have a drawback; any PostScript pictures/figures/images will be omitted.
For a TeX document run pdftex filename
For a LaTeX document run pdflatex filename.