3 LaTeX2HTML basics

L^ATEX2HTML is a perl script, originated by Nikos Drakos at the University of Leeds, U.K., and extended by an ad hoc consortium of technical documentation writers and perl wizards, particularly Ross Moore of the Mathematic Department at MacQuarie University in Sydney, Australia. It provides the following major capabilities:

• the document is broken into components as specified by the user and by L^ATEX sectioning commands, including footnotes, tables of contents, indexing and bibliography;

• the parts of the document that L^ATEX2HTML recognizes are converted to HTML structures, and written out, with appropriate hypertext navigation aids, as .html files;

• all other parts, including math symbols and equations, are passed to L^ATEX to be turned into .dvi files, .ps files and finally into bitmapped .gif images that are cross-linked to the .html as appropriate;

• tables and figures are converted to HTML Table structures and/or images (depending on the HTML output level specified by the user);

• L^ATEX cross-references (labels) are converted into internal hyperlinks;

• external hyperlinks can be generated, so that the .html files can be optimized as part of a larger document structure on the WWW or Intranet;

• conditional text structures allow the output to be optimized differently for the .dvi (hence PostScript) and .html versions;

Two basic limitations must be lived with, however:

• The converter still has some problems with L^ATEX and classic TEX constructs that predate LaTeX2e. It is most reliable for documents written using entirely t LaTeX2e syntax. Conversion of legacy documents can be onerous, particularly for those written with clever TEX macros outside L^ATEX;

• The use of inlined images to represent symbols and equations means that the HTML product is not fully resizable or fully searchable. The results may look ugly in some browser setups, although they are acceptable (even attractive) under a wide range of browser configurations;

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