Abstractmath

I built my website abstractmath.org during the years 2002 through 2006. After that I made sporadic changes, but medical operations and then teaching courses as an adjunct for a couple of years kept me from making much progress until 2010.

This post is an explanation of the tools I used for abstractmath, what went right and what went wrong, and my plans for redoing the website.

Methodology

My previous experience in publishing math was entirely with TeX. When I began work on abstractmath, I wanted to produce html files, primarily because they refloated the text when the window width changed. I was thinking of small screens and people wanting to look at several windows at once.

In those days, there was no method of starting with a LaTeX input file and producing an html file that preserved all the math and all the formatting. I have over the years spent many hours trying out various systems that claimed to do it and not found one that did not require major massaging to get the look I wanted. Most of them can cannot implement all LaTeX commands, or even most of the LaTeX formatting commands. (I have not looked at any of these since 2011.)

In contrast, systems such as PDFTeX turn even very complicated (in formatting and in math) LaTeX files into nearly perfect PDF files. Unfortunately, PDF files are a major impediment to having several windows open at once.

Word and MathType

My solution was to write abstractmath articles using Microsoft Word with MathType, which provides a plugin for Word.

The MathType interface was a very useful expansion of the Equation Editor in Word, and it produced little .gif files that were automatically inserted into the text. MathType also provided a command to create an html file. This file was produced with the usual “_files” folder that contained all the illustrations I had included as well as all the .gif files that MathType created. The html file contained code that put each .gif file in the right place in the typeset text.

That combination worked well. Using Word allowed me tight control over formatting and allowed floating textboxes, which I used freely. They very nicely moved around when you changed the width of the window.

I had used textboxes in my book A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse for apt quotations, additional comments, and (very clever if I say so myself) page indexes. The Handbook is available in several ways:

• Amazon. The citations are not included.
• The Handbook in paper form. A pdf file showing the book as it appears on paper (all the illos, textboxes and page indexes, no hyperlinks), plus all the citations. (This paragraph was modified on 2013-05-02).
• A version with hyperlinks, This includes the citations but omits the boxes and the illustrations, and it has hyperlinks to the citations. The page indexes are replaced by internal hyperlinks.
• The citations.

That book was written in TeX with much massaging using AWK commands. Boxes are much easier to do in Word than they are in TeX, and the html files produced by MathType preserved them quite well. The abmath article on definitions shows boxes used both for side comments and for quotations.

There were some problems with using MathType and Word together. In particular, a longish article would have dozens or hundreds of .gif files, which greatly slowed down uploading via ftp. I now have WebDrive (thanks to CWRU) and that may make it quicker.

Rot sets in

Without my doing anything at all, the articles on abstractmath began deteriorating. This had several main causes.

• Html was revised over time. Currently it is HTML5.0.
• Browsers changed way they rendered the html. And they had always differed among themselves in some situations.
• Microsoft Word changed the way it generated html.

Two of the more discouraging instances of rot were:

• Many instances of math formulas are now out of line with the surrounding text. This happened without my doing anything. It varies by browser and by when I last revised the article.
• Some textboxes deteriorated. In particular, textboxes generated by newer versions of Word were sometimes nearly illegible. Part of the reason for this is that Word started saving them as images.

Failed Forays

The main consequence of all this was that I was afraid of trying to revise articles (or complete them) because it would make them harder to read or ugly. So I set out to find new ways to produce abmath articles. This has taken a couple of years, while abmath is a big mess sprawling there on its website. A mostly legible big mess, and most of the links work, but frustrating to its appearance-sensitive author.

Automatically convert to a new system

My first efforts were to find another system with the property that I could convert my present Word files or html files to the new system without much hand massaging.

I tried converting the Word files to LaTeX input. This was made easier (I thought) because MathType now provided a means for turning all the MathType itty bitty .gif files into LaTeX expressions. I wrote Word macros to convert much of the formatting (italics, bold, subheads, purple prose, and so on) into LaTeX formatting — although I did have to go through the Word text, select each specially formatted piece, and apply the correct macro.

But I had other problems.

• Converting the Mathype images files to LaTeX caused problems because it messed up the spaces before and after the formulas.
• I worked with great sweat and tears to write a macro to extract the addresses from the links — and failed. If I had presevered I probably would have learned how to do it, and learned a lot of Word macros programming in the process.

The automatic conversion process appeared to require more and more massaging.

I made some attempts at automatically converting the html files that Word generates (instead of the doc files), but they are an enormous mess. They insert a huge amount of code (especialy spans) into the text, making it next to impossible to read the code or find anything.

It was beginning to look like I would have to go to an entirely new system and rewrite all the articles from scratch. This was attractive in one respect: in writing this blog my style has changed and I was seeing lots of things I would say or do differently. I have also changed my mind about the importance of some things, and abmath now has stubs and incomplete articles that ought to be eliminated with references to Wikipedia.

Go for rewriting

Meanwhile, I was having trouble with Gyre&Gimble. The WordPress editor works pretty well, but two new products came along:

• MathJax was introduced, providing a much better way to use TeX to insert formulas. (Note: MathType recently implemented the use of MathJax into its html output.)

• Mathematica CDF files, which are interactive diagrams that can be inserted directly into html. (My post Improved Clouds has examples.)

Both MathJax and CDF Player require entering links directly in the html code the WordPress editor produces. The WordPress editor trashed the html code I had entered every time I switched back and forth between “visual” (wysiwyg) and html.

I switched to CKEdit, which preserved the html but has a lot of random behavior. I learned to understand some of the behavior but finally gave up. I started writing my blogs in html using the Coffee Cup HTML Editor — that is how I am writing this. Then I paste it into the WordPress editor.

My current plan is to start revising each abmath article in this way:

• Write html code for the special formatting I want, mostly the code that produces the header, but also purple prose and other things. Once done I can use this code for all the abmath articles with little massaging.
• Start with the Word doc file for an article and use MathType to toggle all the MathType-generated gif files into TeX.
• Generate the html file in a way that preserves the TeX code with dollar signs. (There are two ways to do this and I have not made up my mind which to use.)
• Start revising!

I have already begun doing this. My intention is to revise each abstractmath article, post it, and announce the posting on Gyre&Gimble or on Google+. If an article is heavily revised I expect to post it (or parts of it) on Gyre&Gimble. Some of these things will be ready soon.

Last minute notes

• I used WinEdt, a text editor, to write the Handbook of Mathematical Discourse. It is a powerful html editor, with an extensive macro language that in particular allows rearranging the menus and adding new code to call other applications. It is especially designed for TeX, so is not as convenient as it stands for html. However, its macro language would allow me to convert it to a system that will do most of what Coffee Cup can do. I might do this because Coffee Cup has no macro language and (as far as I can tell) has no way to revise or add to menus.

• It is early days yet, but I am thinking of including pieces of Abstracting Algebra into abstractmath.org.