[l2h] Re: latex2html

[Ross Moore]

Hello Emil,

On 10/02/2006, at 3:40 PM, Emil Mikulic wrote:

> Hi there.
>
> I've been playing around with latex2html lately and found a number of
> issues that I'm trying to hack my way around.  I thought it might be a
> good idea to get in touch with anyone who's working on it, rather than
> doing this in a vacuum.  So, is latex2html still under active
> development / maintainership?  Are you still involved with it?

Yes, I still look after it, though not very actively
as I'm rather short of spare time these days.

>
> I'm running this version:
> http://saftsack.fs.uni-bayreuth.de/~latex2ht/current/ 
> latex2html-2002-2-1.tar.gz
> (according to that host, the file was last modified 25-Oct-2004)
>
> For starters, I'm trying to hack it up to do better antialiasing,
> especially of graphics (non-text) elements in figures.

Well, there is a switch for this.
Anti-aliasing of text and graphic elements is handled
by Ghostscript using different options, and LaTeX2HTML
has a variable that controls whether or not to use them.
Look at the  l2hconfig.pm  file.

rossmoor% grep ALIAS /sw/share/lib/latex2html/l2hconf.pm
# ANTI-ALIASING within generated images
$ANTI_ALIAS = 0;
$ANTI_ALIAS_TEXT = 1;

But there is a problem in setting ANTI_ALIAS = 1;
as follows:

The "cropping bars" will be anti-aliased too!
This means that the  pnmcrop  method that is used
to cut the image to the correct size will not work.
This is because the bars are fuzzified, so there is
not a row all of the same colour along the bottom
of the image, and similarly down the left side.
Even if there was, it would be of some gray-shade,
rather than black. Thus there would need to be more
calls to crop the bottom, so as to get all of the
bars removed, but then there would be problems at
the top of the lower cropping-bar.

In short, a completely new method would be needed
to establish the correct size for the image.
This might relate also to how to position it in
the browser window, requiring use of a CSS file
with entries for each image.


>
> -- 
> Emil Mikulic, UNIX System Administrator                  | Ext: 55202
> Technical Services Group                                 | PGP:  
> 8E4C5D35
> Computer Science, RMIT University                        | Room  
> 10.10.17

Hope this helps,

	Ross

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ross Moore                                         ross at maths.mq.edu.au
Mathematics Department                             office: E7A-419
Macquarie University                               tel: +61 +2 9850 8955
Sydney, Australia  2109                            fax: +61 +2 9850 8114
------------------------------------------------------------------------