Developments: late 1997 to early 1998

Much of the work contributed to L^ATEX2HTML during this time was related to bug fixing and maintaining the 97.1 release, in order to reach a more stable and reliable version which produces HTML code conforming to the W3C standards/drafts. To keep in context with this view, support for HTML 4 has been incorporated into the translator.

There have been improvements to the way math code is handled, as well as font-changing and numbering commands. These now are expected to work much closer to the way that L^ATEX handles them.

Furthermore, missing L^ATEX style translations for basic L^ATEX and A_MS-TEX document classes were added to the distribution: book.perl, report.perl, article.perl, letter.perl, amsbook.perl and amsart.perl. New styles implementing L^ATEX packages include seminar.perl, inputenc.perl and chemsym.perl naming but a few.

The aim is ultimately to support all L^ATEX, A_MS-TEX etc. packages in the standard L^ATEX distribution, or for which there is published documentation. At the time of writing this aim has not quite been reached. To support internationalisation, Perl extensions were provided for HTML output conforming to ISO-Latin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and Unicode encodings.

All of the above work was done by   Ross Moore.

Additional document formats are now supported, these are IndicTEX, FoilTeX, and CWEB documents. You may use any of these packages to translate such documents together with L^ATEX2HTML, refer to the instructions in the various README files.

Thanks go to   Ross Moore for http://www-texdev.mpce.mq.edu.au//l2h/indic/IndicHTML/">IndicTEX/HTML, to   Boris Veytsman for FoilTeX/HTML and to   Jens Lippmann for the CWEB to HTML translator.

Numerous discussions and efforts have been undertaken to get L^ATEX2HTML working independent from the underlying operating system. Yet all obstacles are not quite taken, but it is forseeable that we are OS independent very soon. This release has been reported to run on OS/2, DOS, and MacOS, besides Unix-like operating systems. A former version has also been ported to Amiga OS, but that results still need to be re-integrated into the source. Ports for Windows 95 and Windows NT are also existent but need to be interated.

Thanks go to   Marcus Hennecke,   Axel Ramge,   Marek Rouchal and   Uli Wortmann for fruitful and refreshening discussions about that Override.pm loading scheme (which finally made its way after enough chickens and eggs chased one another to death : )) and to   Daniel Taupin for his successful efforts to get L^ATEX2HTML running on DOS.

Thanks go also to   Fabrice Popineau for his port to Windows NT ³, and   Nikos Drakos for a Windows 95 port based on V96.1h ⁴ (which is mentioned here at last, but not least).

We want to take the opportunity to thank   Scott Nelson and the people at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who help to keep up the L^ATEX2HTML main archive and the mailing list, and to   Achim Bohnet at the Max Planck Institut fuer extraterrestrische Physik, Garching for maintaining the list's online archive. Finally thanks and greetings to all people that contributed to this release and have not been mentioned here...

You all showed spirit and favour. Thank you for your efforts!

... and don't forget Jens and the LiPS team at Darmstadt!

  
Proposals for Future Development:

L^ATEX2HTML-NG

Developed by   Marcus Hennecke  this is a version of L^ATEX2HTML that addresses various issues, not currently handled in the best way by version V97.1. These include:

• validating the HTML output, so that only correctly nested tags, and their contents, can be produced by the translator;
• more TEX-like order of macro-expansion, so that macros and their expansions will produce exactly the results expected from the TEX implementation of L^ATEX;
• faster processing, by streamlining some of the current Perl code, and allowing shorter strings to be handled at any given time;
• customisation issues, allowing easier portability to Unix-like environments on other platforms.

Many of these features have been the inspiration for new code written for L^ATEX2HTML V98.1.

The current version of L^ATEX2HTML-NG can be obtained from the developer's repository, in the directory http://cdc-server.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~latex2html/ng-user. Beware that the files there are not compatible with those of the same name that come with the current version of L^ATEX2HTML.

Extended Capabilities in Web browsers

The following areas are the subject of active development within the Web community. Limited support is available within L^ATEX2HTML for some of these features, using the -html_version 4.0 command-line switch.

   

style-sheets:

proposals for a flexible mechanism to allow cascading (CSS) and DSSSL, within HTML 4.0.    

XML:

eXtensible Markup Language.

   

MathML:

Mathematical Markup Language.

   

CML:

Chemical Markup Language.

 

Fonts:

further support for non-standard font encodings.

 

Icons:

Alternative sets of icons for navigation buttons and other purposes.

For some background on these technologies read   Michel Goossens' survey article ``Hyper-activity in the Web-world'' in CERN Computer Newsletter No. 227, and browse   Axel Ramge's site for ideas on how they could be used with L^ATEX2HTML.