[l2h] Limiting the number of chars per line

[Ronald Hartwig]

(Thanks for all the helpful support to my earlier questions :)

Here's another difficult matter: As I am currently in a project dealing
with the usability of web based (text-) presentation, people will have a
close look if I practice what I preach. One rule we give in our internal
usability manual which I do with latex2html is that the maximum number
of characters per line should never exceed ~60 characters.

Normally you would get this using CSS and a width directive like 

"body,p { width=600px; }" 

but due to errors in the CSS implementation of current browsers, this
ONLY works for the screen but totally destroys the printer output (at
least under netscape). Seems to be a problem of the "px" or "pt" metric,
thats different when applied on printer (300dpi) as to screen (72dpi).
Anyway, this does not work.

Normally you work around this by building a table with a fixed width.
With latex2html you could do this in the head and foot-section of the
.latex2html-init. This works fine as long as no included graphics exceed
this fixed size. If this happens, the table is stretched to the maximum
length of the picture and again the lines are too long.

My question/suggestion: Is there a way to introduce something like a
"text-box" with a fixed width which can be customized?

The result should be something like this:

[header]

<table width="600"><td>
text text text text...
</td></table>

[picture]

<table width="600"><td>
text text text text...
</td></table>

[footer]

Note that footer, picture and header need not to be limited. 

Maybe one could change the behaviour of the text insertion, by adding
the <table ..> to all <p> commands.

I think this would be helpful, as the maximum line length limitation is
a very basic rule that merely applies to all the output of latex2html.

Ronald

-- 
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Institut für Multimediale und Interaktive Systeme
Dipl.-Inform. Ronald Hartwig
Seelandstraße 1a; 23569 Lübeck
Tel: 0451/3909 517 (FAX: -505)  http://www.imis.mu-luebeck.de/hartwig