Image Sharing and Recycling

It is not hard too see how reasonably sized papers, especially scientific articles, can require the use of many hundreds of external images. For this reason, image sharing and recycling is of critical importance. In this context, ``sharing'' refers to the use of one image in more than one place in an article. ``Recycling'' refers to the use of an image left over from a previous run of L^ATEX2HTML. Without this ability, every instance of an image would have to be regenerated each time even the slightest change were made to the document.

All types of images can be shared. These include ``small images'' and figures with or without thumbnails and image-maps. Furthermore, most images can also be reused. The only exception are those which are order-sensitive, meaning that their content depends upon their location. Examples of order-sensitive images are equation and eqnarray environments, when -html_version 2.0 has been specified; this is because their figure numbers are part of the image.

Figures and tables with captions, on the other hand, are order-insensitive because the figure numbers are not part of the image itself.Similarly when HTML 3.2 code is being produced, equation numbers are no longer part of the image. Instead they are placed in a separate cell of a <TABLE>. So most images of mathematical formulas can be reused also.