The exchange of information on technical matters employing the world wide web is hampered in several ways:
- It is difficult to compose and display equations
- It is virtually impossible to do the same with diagrams or sketches
- It is difficult to display special symbols (eg those required by chemists)
TechWiki allows subscripts (C2H5OH) and other mathematical and technical constructs ( for use in linear chemical formula and equations for example) to be displayed easily on a web page.
The TechWiki program is a variant of the Wiki suite of programs which allow users to annotate each others text either by editing it or linking to it.
TechWiki just interposes LaTeX or Natural Math between the editing and the presentation of edited material (in a browser's window) so that equations can be typeset and displayed properly, in context, on the World Wide Web.
Their are two versions of TechWiki, one uses native LaTeX (and therefore requires users to know and employ LaTeX), while the other uses Natural Math, an invention of Prof. Stephen Montgomery-Smith.
Natural Math allows students to input mathematics in a linguistic mode which corresponds more nearly to English than any typesetting language.
In the original TechWiki, LaTeX2HTML was employed to translate the edited message from text (and LaTeX equivalent) to something which could be exported to the WWW for viewing in standard browsers, however that has been droped in favour of pdflatex, a program which generates pdf files from latex input. These are read by Acrobat on the WWW, and provide a much clearer medium for reading and understanding.
One major difficulty with TechWiki environment is the need to e-mail respondents informing them that changes have been made in the Wiki files . This asynchronous (rather than chat) mode of interacting artificially slows the process of communicating.
Another difficlty is that users need to be aquainted with LaTeX.
