Requirements

The translator makes use of several utilities all of which are freely available on most platforms.

You can choose between two ways to do the installation of the required tools: either go the convenient way and install binary distributions (no compilation required, just install out of the box), or get and compile a source code distribution. You will stick to the latter in case you have a special kind of operating system or want to make customisations prior to compilation such as applying source level patches. Windows users will probably want to read the section about installation on Windows.

In case you find one of the URLs below broken, use the search engine on the TUG home page http://ctan.tug.org/ctan/ in order to locate the tool. Other Web-searching facilities such as Altavista or FTP search will also do the job.

For the best use of L^ATEX2HTML you want to get the latest versions of all the utilities that it uses. (It will still work with earlier versions, but some special effects may not be possible. The specific requirements are discussed below.)

• Perl version 5.002, or later (check with perl -v);
• L^ATEX, meaning L^ATEX2_e dated <1995/06/01>, or later;
• dvips or dvipsk, at version 5.58 or later;
• Ghostscript at version 4.02 or later;
• netpbm library of graphics utilities, version 1-MAR-94
  (check with pnmcrop -version ).

More specific requirements for using L^ATEX2HTML depend on the kind of translation you would like to perform, as follows:

1. L^ATEX commands but without equations, figures, tables, etc.
   • Perl Note: L^ATEX2HTML requires Perl 5 to operate.

     Warning 1: You really do need Perl 5.
     Versions of L^ATEX2HTML up to V96.1h work both with Perl 4 at patch level 36 and Perl 5, though some of the packages may only work with Perl 5.
     

     Warning 2: Various aspects of Perl, which are used by L^ATEX2HTML, assume certain system commands to be provided by the operating system shell. If csh or tcsh is used to invoke L^ATEX2HTML then everything should work properly.
     Perl 5 eliminates this requirement on the shell.

   • DBM or NDBM, the Unix DataBase Management system, or GDBM, the GNU database manager.

     Note: Some systems lack any DBM support. Perl 5 comes with its own database system SDBM, but it is sometimes not part of some Perl distributions.

     The installation script install-test will check that for you. If no database system is found, you will have to install Perl properly.

2. L^ATEX commands with equations, figures, tables, etc.
   As above plus ...
   • latex (version 2e recommended but 2.09 will work -- with reduced ability to support styles and packages);
   • (version 5.516 or later) or dvipsk
     Version 5.62 or higher enhances the performance of image creation with a significant speed-up. See latex2html.config for this after you are done with the installation. Do not use the 'dvips -E' feature unless you have 5.62, else you will get broken images.
   • gs Ghostscript (version 4.03 or later); with the ppmraw device driver, or even better pnmraw. Upgrade to 5.10 or later if you want to go sure about seldom problems with 4.03 to avoid (yet unclarified).
   • The library of graphics utilities; netpbm dated 1 March 1994 is required, else part of the image creation process will fail.
     Check with: pnmcrop -version .

     Several of the filters in those libraries are used during the PostScript to GIF conversion.

   • If you want PNG images, you need pnmtopng (current version is 2.31). It is not part of netpbm and requires libpng-0.89c.tar.gz and libz (1.0.4) (or later versions). pnmtopng supports transparency and interlace mode.
     Netscape Navigator as well as MS IE do support inlined PNG images.

3. Segmentation of large documents
   If you wish to use this feature, you will have to upgrade your L^ATEX to L^ATEX2_e. Some other hyperlinking features also require L^ATEX2_e.

4. Transparent inlined images
   If you dislike the white background color of the generated inlined images then you should get either the netpbm library (instead of the older pbmplus) or install the filter by Andreas Ley <ley@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de>. L^ATEX2HTML now supports the shareware program giftool (by Home Pages, Inc., version 1.0), too. It can also create interlaced GIFs.

If Ghostscript or the netpbm library are not available, it is still possible to use the translator with the -no_images option.

If you intend to use any of the special features of the translator then you have to include the html.sty file in any L^ATEX documents that use them.

Since by default the translator makes use of inlined images in the final HTML output, it would be better to have a viewer which supports the <IMG> tag, such as NCSA Mosaicor Netscape Navigator. Any browser which claims to be compatible with HTML 3.2 should meet this requirement.

If only a character-based browser, such as lynx, is available, or if you want the generated documents to be more portable, then the translator can be used with the -ascii_mode option.