[texhax] lwarp vs. tex4ht

[Brian Dunn]

On Sunday, March 20, 2016, Uwe Lueck wrote:
> > This is a LaTeX package which causes LaTeX to directly generate HTML
> > tags, using pdftotext and a few other utilities to convert the resulting
> > PDF file into HTML files.
> 
> The approach is interesting, yet if you convert LaTeX to PDF
> and the result to HTML, the meaning of "direct" forbids calling
> this a "direct" generation of HTML. It is just as "direct" as
> the late Eitan Gurari's tex4ht.

The difference being that in the case of lwarp, LaTeX itself is deciding and 
generating the HTML tags.  The only post-processing is the extraction of text 
from PDF, which is then renamed with an .html suffix.  (Also, there is 
additional processing of graphics images by other programs.)

> I have never used tex4ht, but my impression is that this is the
> most promising way to get HTML from LaTeX. So you should tell
> what lwarp offers that tex4ht doesn't.

tex4ht does a reasonable conversion when fed the lwarp test suite.  There are 
some differences in ability and ease of configuration.

Based on a quick review of the tex4ht interpretation of the lwarp test suite, 
differences include:

- xcolor color box and frame box
- HTML entities for various kinds of fixed-width spaces
- epigraphs
- lwarp doesn't do tabular <{} and >{} columns yet, or | vertical rules
- lwarp does prettier booktabs, but cannot do (lr) trimming yet
- they each have different ideas about vertical alignment of tabular rows, but 
LaTeX and HTML have different abilities here, and they do not totally overlap.
- math can be MathML in tex4ht, and is svg with LaTeX copy/paste in lwarp
- sfrac is better in lwarp
- \nameref to a figure gives the section name in tex4ht but the figure caption 
in lwarp
- \pageref provides a useful link in lwarp
- lwarp can do rotatebox, scalebox, and reflectbox (thanks to CSS3), but HTML 
does not adapt the whitespace appropriately, so this is of limited use.
- tex4ht didn't handle a picture environment in an fbox.  Vertical space was 
not provided.  This seems to be true of all the boxes in the test suite.
- texh4 didn't handle an fbox with tikz inside, but I haven't tried very hard 
to get it to work yet.
- tex4ht places footnotes on a separate HTML page ( this may be a 
configuration option).  lwarp places them at the bottom of each section or 
HTML page.
- By default, tex4ht is placing newlist items inline, but I haven't tried to 
change it yet.
- Due to CSS3, lwarp is able to place minipages side-by-side with user-
selectable vertical alignment.
- Also due to CSS3, lwarp is able to use multiple columns, which adapt to page 
width.
- lwarp can float-right the comments in algorithmicx.
- lwarp generates less clutter in the HTML output.  (Where it comes to math, 
they're both pretty bad. Lots of images v.s. lots of MathML.)
- texh4 can generate several kinds of output beyond HTML

The package and test suite are both provided in the .zip file found on the 
website below.


Brian


-- 
Brian Dunn
BD Tech Concepts LLC
http://www.BDTechConcepts.com
bd at BDTechConcepts.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdtechconcepts/
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