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

[Volker Simonis]

Hi Rob, hi Ross,

perhaps you remember that on Wed, 26 Jun 2002 I posted a message on this list 
with  the subject: "Re: [l2h] Interaction between 'show_section_numbers' and 
'short_index'" in which i wrote the following:

..
Ok, perhaps I should explain what I am really doing. I'm writing some scripts 
which take the L2H output and generate the XML-files needed for the JavaHelp 
system (JavaHelp is a HTML-based Help system for Java-Programs, which needs 
some additional XML configuration files for generating a Table Of Contents 
View, an Index View and so on (see http://java.sun.com/products/javahelp/))
..
I also wanted to ask you what do you think about incorporating my scripts 
which generate the JavaHelp XML configuration files into L2H. Currently they 
are written in AWK, but if you see a chance to take this extensions into the 
main distribution, I could eventually reprogram them in Perl. I think the 
extensions are non-intrusive and would just add some more switches to L2H 
which in turn would lead to the generation of some xml-files. If yo're 
interested in the topic I can supply you with some more information about 
JavaHelp and how to create JavaHelp systems from LaTeX files with the help of 
L2H.
..

It seems to me that JavaHelp and HelpView are quite similar systems. 
Meanwhile I extended my scripts to also produce the XML-files needed for the 
Index View of Java Help out of the various .pl files produced by L2H. 
Unfortunately my scripts are still written in AWK. 

My question is now: will the format of the various .pl files produced by L2H 
be stable in the future? This will be on of the main conditions for the 
implementation of the proposed postprocessor for generating the HelpView (and 
eventually the JavaHelp) configuration files.

Volker Simonis


On Sunday 25 August 2002 17:43, you wrote:
> 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
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
> http://finance.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> latex2html mailing list
> latex2html@tug.org
> http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/latex2html