[l2h] URL data base - new feature proposal

[Janusz S. Bien]

The purpose of the proposed feature is
 - to make LaTeX source cleaner and more readable
 - to facilitate updating URLs
 - to facilitate associating an URL with several inflexional forms of
   a given word or phrase.
I hope it is possible to implement it by reusing the already
existing Perl code for handling e.g. BibTeX.

I propose to introduce a new primitive, say \anchor, typically bound
to an active character, say ^ . This choice is inspired by Knuth's use
of ^ for indexing puprose, cf. TeXbook p. 424.

For the time being LaTeX (i.e. html.sty) can simply ignore this
primitive. Here is what latex2html should do about it:

First, all the arguments of ^ should be written to a special
auxiliary file, say <jobname>.lru. This file should be then processed
by some software (e.g. the favourite text editor); the result should
be a new file, say <jobname>.url, in which every item from the input
file has been supplemented by an appropriate URL (possibly empty);
every such pair should be unique, i.e. duplicates should be removed. 
This file, if exists, should be read in at the beginning of every
latex2html run, and for every non-empty URL the occurence of ^ should
be treated as \htmlnormallink with two arguments: the first one -
the argument of ^, the second one - the URL associated with it in the
.url file.

Of course, this basic mechanism can be expanded, e.g. by allowing
\anchor to take parameters for switching between \htmlnormallink and
\htmlnormallinkfoot etc.

If I am not sufficiently clear, I will be only too happy to
elaborate.

Any comments are welcome!

Best regards

Janusz

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                     ,   
dr hab. Janusz S. Bien, prof. UW
Prof. Janusz S. Bien, Warsaw Uniwersity
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