[l2h] Looking for section/navigation info

[Rhonda Hyslop]

* Ross Moore <ross at ics.mq.edu.au> [12 Feb 2004 00:40]:
> On 12/02/2004, at 6:34 PM, Rhonda Hyslop wrote:
> > I have found numerous copies of the latex2html documentation, and have
> > read the section on customizing the navigation, but what is described
> > there is not what I want to do. Basically, I want to have a list of all
> > the top-level sections as part of the navigation instead of just the
> 
> Have you seen the online `frames' version of the documentation
> [snip]
> Ar these close to the kind of navigation that you have in mind ?

I have seen the frames version. As for what I had in mind, not really...
I want something on the page with the top-level sections (not
necessarily the entire tree) that I can then put to the side.  Rather
like a conventional site navigation sidebar. (I also want to customize
more of the page, but that's a different issue.)

> For these documents you can download the source documents, Makefile
>   and init-files, from the obvious directory.

I'm afraid the "obvious" directory isn't obvious to me... do people
usually put their source files and makefiles online with their
documents?

> Since LaTeX2HTML requires just a single run, it is clear that it must
> revisit all the pages to add navigation, after the bulk of the document
> processing has been done.

I'd noticed that... the last bit of output is always "doing section
links..." as it does the navigation.

> So it is not sufficient to just find the right Perl variable(s), but
> you also need to look at it/them at the correct time within the
> processing.
> 
> In particular, all of the sectioning links are added to all the HTML
> pages, as one of the last tasks of all to be performed.  It would be
> very hard to insert extra coding to show the appropriate values. this
> certainly cannot be done in the LaTeX coding, but would ned to be done
> within the Perl scripts.

I have no problem with doing this in perl instead of LaTeX - in fact
that's what I assumed I would have to do, from within the
top_navigation_panel subroutine. What I'm having trouble with is
figuring out where I can find 1) a variable with all of the section
titles, numbers, and filenames that I can parse to build my menu, and 2)
some indicator of what section is currently being processed. latex2html
obviously knows what section it's working on when it runs
top_navigation_panel and builds the next and previous links, because it
does them correctly.

The %section_info hash seems to have the information I'm looking for in
point 1, but I'm still trying to figure out what the structure of that
information is.

-Rhonda
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