[l2h] Support for a cross-platform HTML document viewer application (and .hhc files)

[Rob OConnor]

Hi,

I tried out latex2html and it works great.

I was wondering if there is any capacity to generate a
.hhc file (I looked through the documentation and
couldn't find any mention).

An .hhc file is a Html Help Contents file. It is just
an SGML list of links to make a tree heirarchy of
contents. It is used to make the MS Help .CHM files.
However, there is now a free open-source
cross-platform version of this type of help file spec.
It is called HelpView. Some screenshots and download
links are here:
http://www.storylinescentral.com/helpview.htm

The nice thing is that it allows a user to do a nice
client-side search of the html documents, on a
book-to-book basis, as well as the compression of the
html to shrink the needed harddrive space.

The implementation is pretty straightforward. There is
3 parts:
(a) The html documents, as generated by latex2html.
(b) A .hhc file, which is exactly the same as the
"Contents" hierarchy of hyperlinks in a latex2html
document, except that <a> tags are replaced with
<object> tags.
(c) A five line text file called a .hhp (html help
project) file that just gives the name of the book,
and tells which page is the first page to display.
These 3 parts get zipped up into a single zip file
which can be then distributed. The viewer application
just reads the zipped file.

It seems like it wouldn't be more than a half-hour to
implement, if the capacity isn't there already. My
Perl skills are not strong, but I am willing to assist
in any way.

Any comments?

Best wishes,
Robert

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