[l2h] Using LaTeX2HTML for blogging

[Peter D. Junger]

I have started a weblog called ``Samsara's Blog'' at
<http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/blog/> and I am using LaTeX2HTML
(along with EMACS and vim) to create the blog on my linux
box.

Being old and not a GU I detest GUI's.  I already used 
LaTeX2HTML for other purposes, so, when I started my
blog it was the obvious software for me to use.

I am very happy with the result, but I do want to report on
one problem that I had to overcome, for which I did not find
the documentation available too helpful.

Originally each section of the blog was placed in a file 
with a name like "node1.html", "note2.html", etc.  And each
time I added a section all those file names changed, which
made it impossible for one to create a permanent link to
a given section in the blog.

It turned out that the way to solve that problem was simply
to add the option " -long_titles 8" when I invoked latex2html
from the command line.  After that each of files ended up
with the name of the section followed by the ".html" extension.

But that caused a new problem: LaTeX2HTML no longer generated
an "index.html" file, but rather only a file with the name
of the title of the blog, which I set in the command
line with the option "-t samsara_blog".

Here is the way the command-line looks:

  latex2html  -t samsara_blog -long_titles 8 blogmaster.tex

The solution to that problem was to create a file called
".latex2html-init" in the directory from which I called
the latex2html program.  That file contains the following settings:

	$NO_AUTO_Link = 1;

	$LINKNAME = '"index$EXTN"';

	$LINKPOINT = '"samsara_blog$EXTN"';

	#$USE_CURLY_QUOTES = 0;

I just wish that the documentation had been clearer and I hope
that this will be of help to someone in the future.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger at samsara.law.cwru.edu    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu   
     NOTE: junger at pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu no longer exists