[OS X TeX] User Friendly LaTeX to HTML Converter?

[Matthew Leingang]

On Apr 28, 2008, at 5:08 PM, Richard J Benish wrote:

> At the beginning of the initial thread (LaTeX2html Basics?)  
> concerning this topic I mentioned my desire to convert portions of  
> a long paper to html. (That thread digressed a bit, so I started a  
> new one.)


Dear Richard,

I can definitely understand your desire to do so.  But in case you're  
flexible on the format, there are some other alternatives.

* Websites like scribd.com allow you to upload and share PDFs in a  
snazzy Web 2.0 way.  It gives you a flash-based view of the document  
that you can page through, and snippets of HTML that you can paste  
into your web pages.  See

http://www.scribd.com/doc/511292/Lesson-24-Optimization-II-worksheet- 
solutions

for an example.  You can even retain all the rights on whatever you  
publish through them.

* You can just link to the PDF.  Google can search PDFs so you retain  
a lot of machine-readability.  The majority of users use a browser  
with an Acrobat Reader plugin so their experience is almost the same  
as if the page were HTML.  (Not that I'm advocating doing whatever  
the majority wants; I'm just saying that in my years of posting PDFs  
to the web, nobody's asked me to please post an HTML version instead.)

Also, GELLMU <http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu/> takes source  
files written in a slightly-dumbed down LaTeX syntax and can create  
HTML, XHTML+MathML, or PDF.    I don't know too much about it, but  
I've always wanted to learn more.  This might not be the choice for  
you since your paper is already written in standard LaTeX.

I think that people who do a lot of wholesale conversion from latex  
to html use scriptable applications such as tex4ht, but even that  
doesn't work 100% of the time.  And a GUI app is still only as good  
as its backend.

Regards,
Matthew Leingang

--
Matthew Leingang
Preceptor in Mathematics
Harvard University

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~leingang/vCard.vcf