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A system is referred to as being a Legacy System if it is old, yet still used today because we don't see the need to replace or redesign it.
In particular, when referring to the production of documents and reports we are talking about TeX or LaTeX.
I will try to outline how to convert source LaTeX code into something useful. This is because the GLOSS system can convert your source GLOSS code into tex, so you might like to know how to view and print LaTeX. For a more detailed introduction to LaTeX, please visit Learning LaTeX, a guide by Dr Kaye at the University of Birmingham
TeX is a typesetting program. This means it provides a means to present textual material on a variety of mediums including; printing to screen and printing to paper.
LaTeX is a mark-up language that uses the TeX typesetting program, so you can write textual documents using LaTeX. One particularly appealing characteristic of LaTeX is its ability to produce mathematical formulae, and do it well.
LaTeX source code has extension .tex. In order to convert your source code into something useful you will need to download a LaTeX system, one such system is mikTeX. MikTeX works for Windows systems, if you are running Linux you already have everything you need. The format that LaTeX is automatically converted into is dvi. This is a format designed for the LaTeX system and represents your document as binary data. The advantage of this is that it makes the output device independent, this is where the acronym dvi comes from.
Most LaTeX systems, like mikTeX, come with pre-viewers for you to view your output dvi file, and from these programs you can usually print as well. It is often the case that you want to convert your source code into PDF instead of dvi. This can be done in mikTeX by replacing the latex
command by pdflatex
in the command line interface.
Once mikTeX is installed (for Windows systems), enter the Command Line Interface for your computer, type latex
and press enter. You should get something like the following:
Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp. C:\Documents and Settings\Paul>latex This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.30.6-2.2 (MiKTeX 2.5) **
At which point you type the name of the file to be converted.
Please note your Command Line Interface must be navigated into the directory of your source code, for an introduction on how to do this go to the section: Command Prompt Basics
There are other ways to convert your source code, including using a text editor which has a 'convert to dvi' or 'convert to PDF' button for you to use.
The question arises: Why do we need to bother with writing mathematical webpages in XHTML if we can just convert our LaTeX into PDF and upload our PDF files. The answer is: It is a matter of personal choice.
XHTML is portable. Since it is based on XML, XHTML can be viewed in many more ways than PDF. Also, by writing in XHTML you inherit the navigational tools of HTML which will allow you to introduce some interactivity to your documentation. Also, it is not easy to 'get at' a PDF file, you may have experienced some problems with copying and pasting text, and images etc inside a PDF file whereas you wouldn't have these problems in XHTML. Also, a mathematical webpage will become accessible by a search engine whereas this becomes difficult with PDF. These are just a few of the reasons to use XHTML over PDF, but there are many more.
On the other hand, XHTML isn't as easily 'pretty' as PDF. I would recommend creating both a PDF version of your document and an XHTML version. The XHTML version provides the accessibilty whereas PDF provides the looks.
As mentioned above, the GLOSS system has the capability to convert your GLOSS source code into TeX, HTML and XHTML. By copying across necessary files to the location of your output file, you can then easily convert your tex file to dvi or pdf, or view your HTML in a browser. For more information please see the section: Transforming your XHTML.
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