| The LaTeX2HTML Translator |
|
Drakos/Moore |
Developments: late 1996 to mid 1997
During the latter part of 1996 there was much work on improving the
capabilities of LATEX2HTML.
Some of this was due to the World Wide Web Consortium's proposals for HTML 3.2,
becoming a formal recommendation in November 1996,
and their subsequent acceptance in January 1997.
Existing LATEX markup for effects such as centering, left-
or right-justification of paragraphs,
flow of text around images, table-layout with formal captions, etc.
could now be given a safe translation into HTML 3.2, compliant with a standard
that would guarantee that browsers would be available to view such effects.
At the same time developers were exploring ways to enhance the overall
performance of LATEX2HTML.
As a result the current V97.1 release has significant improvements in
the following areas:
image-generation
- is much faster, requires less memory
and inline images are aligned more accurately;
-
image quality
- is greatly improved by the use of anti-aliasing effects for on-screen clarity,
in particular with mathematics, text and line-drawings;
-
memory-requirements
- are much reduced, particularly with image-generation;
-
mathematics
- can now be handled using a separate parsing procedure;
images of sub-parts of expressions can be created, rather
than using a single image for the whole formula;
-
macro definitions
- having a more complicated structure than previously allowed,
can now be successfully expanded;
-
counters
- and numbering are no longer entirely dependent on the .aux
file generated by LATEX;
-
decisions
- about which environments to include or exclude can now be made;
-
HTML effects
- for which there is no direct LATEX counterpart
can be requested in a variety of new ways;
-
HTML code
- produced by the translator is much neater and more easily readable,
containing more comments and fewer redundant breaks and <P> tags.
-
error-detection
- of simple LATEX errors, such as missing or unmatched braces,
is now performed -- a warning message shows a line or two
of the source code where the error has apparently occurred;
For these developments, thanks goes especially to:
-
Jens Lippmann
- for creating and maintaining the CVS repository at http://www.latex2html.org/user/.
This has made it much easier for the contributions from different developers
to be collected and maintained as a ``development version'' which
is kept up-to-date and available at all times. Together with Marek Rouchal he produced an extensive rewrite of the texexpand utility.
-
Ross Moore
- for extensive work on almost all aspects of the LATEX2HTML source
and documentation,
combining code for LATEX, Perl, HTML and other utilities.
Most of the coding for the new features based on HTML 3.2,
many of the new packages, faster image-generation
and the improved support for mathematics
and other environments, is his work.
-
Marek Rouchal
- for extending the former pstogif utility,
transforming it into pstoimg which now allows for
alternative image formats, such as PNG.
Also he produced the neat configure-pstoimg script, which eases
LATEX2HTML installation, and a rewrite of texexpand.
-
Marcus Hennecke
- who has always been there, up-to-date with developments in HTML and
related matters concerning Web publishing,
and tackling the issues involved with portability
of LATEX2HTML to Unix systems on various platforms.
Furthermore Marcus has produced LATEX2HTML-NG, a version of
LATEX2HTML which handles expansion of macros in a more ``TEX-like''
fashion. This should lead to further improvements in speed and efficiency,
while allowing complicated macro definitions to work as would be expected
from their expansions under LATEX.
(This requires Perl 5,
using some programming features not available with Perl 4.)
-
Fabrice Popineau
- has produced
an adaptation for the Windows NT platform, of LATEX2HTML V97.1.
-
Uli Wortmann
- showed how to configure Ghostscript to produce
anti-aliasing effects within images.
-
Axel Ramge
- for various suggestions and examples of enhancements,
and the code to avoid a problem with Ghostscript.
Thanks also to all those who have made bug-reports, supplied fixes
or offered suggestions as to features that might allow LATEX2HTML
to be used more efficiently in particular circumstances.
Most of these have been incorporated into this new version V97.1,
though perhaps not in the form originally envisaged.
Such feedback has contributed enormously to helping make LATEX2HTML the
easy to use, versatile program that it has now become.
Keep the ideas coming!
Subsections
To: 1st LATEX2HTML Workshop Darmstadt, 15 February 1997
