Help
maths online HTML formula tool
This tool shall enable you to implement some important mathematical symbols in your web pages. In order to use it, you should have some basic knowledge on HTML. Besides characters that are provided by the standard font, there are two ways to generate special symbols:
The tool offers two palettes of special symbols which partially overlap, and between which you may freely switch. The first (called Symbol-Font) represents symbols not present in the standard font by using the Symbol font. The second (Unicode) uses Unicode in some cases (as far as supported by most recent browsers), and the Symbol font in others. (One may expect an increasing reservoir of such characters in future browser versions). We use the following color code:

 uses the standard font (supported by any browser) 
 uses Symbol font  (supported by Netscape 6+/Mozilla
 only after problem fixing
 uses Unicode (supported only by recent browsers) 

If you click at one of the red symbols (which are hyperlinks but not underlined in modern browsers), its HTML code is displayed in the tex field (left), and its representation by the web browser in the frame at the right. You may insert your own code into the text field, and thereafter click Refresh, in order to update the representation. Until you do this, a brown border around the text field warns you that code and representation might not be identical. Using the link Clear you may reset the content of both text field and representation frame.

You may choose out of two possible working modes:

  • Clear/new (which is the default after loading the tool) results in a representation of each newly chosen symbol, the previous content of the text field being deleted. This mode is appropriate if you look for the HTML code of a particular symbol.
  • Append causes newly chosen symbols to be appended to the previous content of the text field. This code is suitable if you want to compose some piece of code containing several symbols.
You may transfer the content of the text field into the HTML code of your web page by copy und paste (Ctrl C und Crtl V). Alternatively, you may load the representation in a separate browser window by clicking Represent in own window, and save as a web page (or print) the result.

In case you do not find the symbol you are after among the ones displayed, you might find them in the two lists loaded by the links "standard font" und "symbol font", showing all possible symbols under these fonts.

For further possibilities to bring mathematical formulae on the web see the page formulae and the web.




Some technical remarks:

When composing formulae or pieces of text (in principle you may generate a complete web page) you shoult keep the lengths of lines in the code not too long if you want to be able to read it later. Here one should consider that HTML tags may be broken into several lines (except after the opening "<"). Furthermore formulae should be designed such that they are not broken apart by the browser.

Example:
The representation of the formula 2a2 = 1 (no space between the symbols 2, a and the exponent) may be achieved by

    2<font face="Symbol">a</font><sup>2</sup> = 1

or (which is identical for the browser), by

    2<font face="Symbol">a</font
    ><sup>2</sup> = 1


whereas

    2<font face="Symbol">a</font><
    sup>2</sup> = 1


is not allowed. The code

    2<font face="Symbol">a</font>
    <sup>2</sup> = 1


looks better, but generates an additional space between a and the exponent and is represented as 2a 2 = 1.

In order to prevent the formula from being broken apart by the browser, the code may be replaced either by

    2<font face="Symbol">a</font
    ><sup>2</sup>&nbsp;=&nbsp;1


(where &nbsp; is the HTML code for a space at which the browser never breaks - it is contained in the last line of the tool) or by

    <nobr>2<font face="Symbol">a</font
    ><sup>2</sup> = 1</nobr>


(where the browser never breaks between <nobr> and </nobr>, despite the space in the code).