[l2h] Re: Guillemets and OE

[Ross Moore]

> On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, taupin wrote:
> 
> > 1. Is there now a means of making the << and >> be converted as French
> > guillemets, as defined in EC fonts (at least as an option). I have 99.1.
> 
> How are they coded in LaTeX? It should be fairly easy to provide an
> appropriate conversion as they are part of the ISO-Latin-1 character set.
> Ross?

No, they are not in Latin-1; that's the whole problem.
Indeed they aren't in Latin-2, -3, -4, -5 or -6.
When they drew up the ISO 8859-1,....,10 standards, the frenchmen
were out of the room. Icelandic characters got in, but French ones
were left out.  (At least, that's the runour I've heard.)

But the situation has been fixed now, with  Latin-9,  aka ISO 8859-15
                                                  ^                ^^
:-)  --- it took that long to appease the French !

viz.   http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/latin9.html

This includes the  euro  symbol, and drops the  currency  symbol.
It is mostly Latin-1, with just a few changes:
e.g., plain accents (not accented letters) and the simple fractions
have been replaced by Polish caron'd S and Z, and the oe OE and \"y .

It won't take long to create a new  latin9.pl  extension.
Of course if browsers don't recognise latin9 yet, then it isn't much
good to you.

 
> > 2. More than one year ago I asked why \OE was not translated as &#140;
> > and \oe as &#156; . Ross's answer was that these characters wrer not in
> > HTML standard.
> 
> That is true: There is &aelig; and &AElig; but no &oelig; ;-(

You could get them using   -html_version 4.0,unicode  
This works, but again it is up to the browser to give the right characters.

 
> >  I agreed with that restriction but I still find out that the generated
> > images are not at the right size, especially since everybody tunes his
> > browser to non-standard font sizes. And the generated gif is NOT
> > dependent of the size chose with any particular browser.
> 
> Nothing you will ever be able to deal with when producing mixed image/text
> pages...

Not so sure about that!
I haven't tested Netscape 4.6 yet.
If it has better support for stylesheets, then it may be possible
to have the browser rescale .gif images.
The effect has been tested, and *works*, using MSIE4.
(Unfortunately, NS4 stuffs up so badly that the whole page is mangled.)

The effect is to tag the <IMG ID="..." ...>  with a unique ID,
then set the size in a stylesheet, using the 'em' size of the font.
(Thanks to Alan Flavell for the idea.)
The HTML file still has an absolute size (in points) but the stylesheet
size is supposed to override. 

 
> >  Besides, I observed that most brosers (IE and Netscape now recognise
> > these characters and display them, either as \oe or as oe. Therefore, I

That would depend on the browser.
Netscape 4.5 certainly recognises  &#338; and  &#339; 
though it may depend in the stated charset.


> > would like to have an option (maybe a perl style) which OPTIONALLY (and
> > under the responsability of the person who generates the *.html)
> > produces these characters inseatd of the GIF images (I keep needing GIF
> > images for maths, of course).

You can redefine:   

\begin{htmlonly}
\renewcommand{\oe}{oe}
\renewcommand{\OE}{OE}
\end{htmlonly}

if you like.
Alternatively you can construct the Perl versions of these subroutines.

sub do_cmd_oe { 'oe'.$_[0] }
sub do_cmd_OE { 'OE'.$_[0] }

Put this in your latex2html.config file (or the corresponding thing with v99.2)
If that doesn't work, then put it into a .latex2html-init file.


> > 
> > => can you implement that option and, if possible, suggest me a patch in
> > latex2html code, which I shall implement myself (I have both Win98/MSDOS
> > and Linux).
> 
> Could be done with a "version" .perl module. Ross?

No need. It will be in  latin9.pl  instead.  ;-)


Cheers,
	
	Ross