[hlx] Re: Paragraphs in version 2.9; TeX4ht

[Peter M. <P.D...@sw...>]

On 12 Oct 2005, at 04:40, tom sgouros wrote:

> Otfried Cheong <ot...@cs...> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> Finally,
>> tex4ht uses the Tex engine itself - the cleanest to parse TeX input,
>> of course.  However, it's way of extracting the XML appears quite
>> awkward to me.
>
> tex4ht is a very strange beast, and I've never had much luck with it.

I recently took a fresh look at the various converters from LaTeX to 
HTML, and found TeX4ht quite attractive. So far, I've only tried using 
it for my home page <http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~cspdm/PDMosses.html>, 
but I intend to try it on some larger documents too. It took me some 
time to become sufficiently familiar with the many TeX4ht configuration 
options (some of them are documented only in the .log file produced 
when using the "info" option!) but after that, most of the effort was 
working out how to generate navigation panels, and developing some CSS 
code.

I think the main advantage of TeX4ht (over Hyperlatex and all other 
converters from LaTeX to HTML) is that it's entirely based on (La)TeX 
programs. When using it, each LaTeX markup command is redefined to have 
various hooks, which are then configured to generate HTML (or other 
code). The configuration can be done in a separate file (still using 
LaTeX commands), or specified by command-line options. The generated 
code is subsequently extracted from the DVI file, together with the 
running text, to produce the web pages.

My impression is that TeX4ht produces XHTML which usually renders very 
much like the original LaTeX - also regarding paragraphs in list items. 
I'm not claiming that Hyperlatex should always produce exactly the same 
XHTML as TeX4ht, but at least TeX4ht might be useful as a point of 
reference. The TeX4ht home page is at 
<http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/TeX4ht/mn.html>. You may find 
that a recent version of TeX4ht is already included in your (La)TeX 
installation.

-- Peter Mosses

Prof Peter D Mosses  <p.d...@sw...>
Dept of Computer Science, Swansea University
Home: www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~cspdm/PDMosses.html