I am creating an HTML Web page and wish to include the TeX and LaTeX logos (in case you didn't know, those are text processing markup languages). These logos are made up of standard Latin letters arranged with some funky scaling and kerning. While TeX and LaTeX can easily handle this, I am not aware of any such scaling and kerning control in HTML. So far the best I have come up with is to create an image file and to include it in-line with the rest of the sentence, something like "...we use the *LT*IMG SRC="images/latexlogo.jpg" ALT="LaTeX (pronounced Lah-Tech)" WIDTH="xxx" HEIGHT="yyy"*GT* markup language to...". Is this the best way? While the ALT tag should permit usability for screen readers and non-graphics browsers, if the browser's default font size is different from mine the logo won't scale up or down, and will look ugly. Is there any widely-supported way to scale graphics in step with whatever the font size is? And, as long as I'm asking, is PNG widely enough supported to make it a better choice than JPEG? I'm using The GIMP, which doesn't create GIF output. Thanks in advance for any help!

A few answers:

First, odds are that you won't be able to achieve the look you're going for as seen on their home page. They use an image to show the logo, and you will need to as well.

For the ALT attribute, I'd just do as they do and use the "LaTeX" label.

I don't believe there are any scalable (vector) graphics that are widely supported natively, but as long as you use a specific font size then you'll probably be fine. If you're worried about it though, you might consider just saying "LaTeX" instead of using an image.

As to what format to use, PNG offers good filesize/quality ratios but IE does not support PNG transparency without using a special filter. As long as you don't use transparency then PNGs are fine. JPEG isn't what you want for a small low-color image. GIF is ideal for this application.

Have you updated GIMP lately? The copyright on the LZW (GIF) algorithm expired recently, so it should be able to read and write GIF files just as the PHP gd2 library can now. You might check to see if a newer version has this ability.

Hi Dr. Nick! Thanks for the suggestions. I will get a newer copy of The GIMP and see what it does about GIFs. I will give an image a try and see how it looks -- if customers say it looks crummy, I'll change to just "LaTeX" text in-line and put an image of the logo elsewhere.

Phil