It’s six in the morning, and I need to leave soon to go fight my own battles as a ninth-grade English teacher, but please forgive me if this repeats something from the myriad comments above; I simply didn’t have time to read them all.

First, the suggested to go with LaTeX in some form or another is really the best way to go when it comes to typesetting math. There’s a learning curve, but it’s just a markup language after all, so it makes sense, after a fashion. A big advantage is that editing files requires only a text editor. Processing them to PDF is a different story and may or may not work with your district’s software. Here, a bit of techno-trickery and Mac-deliciousness can come to the rescue. You could set up a mail rule to intercept messages sent from you to you with a specific subject line that would take an attached file and run it through the app that processes the files, and email the resulting PDF back to you. A little Automator workflow might help, too.

Option two along the same lines would be to create a folder action script for a shared folder on your home computer that you could access from school. Upload a text file, and magically, a typeset PDF would appear in the same folder. AppleScript and Automator here are your best friends.

Back on the webpage bit, your .Mac account is far more flexible than many people realize. Anything you drop in the /Sites folder becomes immediately available to the world via http. Anything dropped in the /Public folder can be accessed through an Mac’s Finder app (check out the “Go -> iDisk” submenu) or any PC from idisk.mac.com. It’s great stuff and invaluable (to me, at least) for publishing documents. Any time I make a document, I save a PDF to my Public folder, and it’s online for my kids. Having a nice website integrated with it will make the procedure less daunting for kids and parents alike. (Just to drop in the thought, my homemade classroom site was made in RapidWeaver and hosted on .Mac: misterfriend [dot] net.)

Last thought: PDFs. If you have Leopard installed, the Preview app has a glorious new option that has all but eliminated my need for Acrobat. When looking at any graphic file (including those you’ve scanned in), Go to File -> Save… and from the Format option, choose PDF. The Quartz Filter drop-down that appears has a magical “Reduce File Size” option that will take even the largest of .jpg files and make them astonishingly portable and manageable.

Good luck! Thanks for striking up this line of conversation! I’ll have to come back tonight and read the rest of the posts.