[l2h] [pdftex] DVI to HTML mechanism demo

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Sebastian Rahtz writes:

 > I confess, I don't know *why* you'd want to use TeX to write web
 > pages. That's what God gave you XML for :-}

Sebastian, how do you write math formulas?  Directly in XML?  Or do
you use a dedicated formula editor?  I understand that people want to
enter formulas in tex syntax because this is most straightforward.

As far as I know, tex4ht can also create XML, but I fear that formulas
are provided as bitmaps.  This is probably not as bad as it sounds
because it avoids problems with fonts which are not installed
everywhere.

How do you solve the font problem in XML?  A reasonable solution would
be to provide them as SVG fonts.  But are they understood by most web
browsers we have today?  I'm not very optimistic but you certainly can
tell us more.

BTW, at the TUG-2006 conference in Marrakech Adrian Frischauf
demonstrated his program dvi2svg and I had been quite impressed.
Fonts had been provided as SVG.  Adrian used a program written by
Michel Goossens which converts Type1 fonts to SVG.  The SVG file
contained all the resources needed, and what impressed me most was to
see perfectly typeset math formulas and text in Computer Modern in a
web browser.  Anyway, I suppose that most web browsers do not support
SVG properly yet.

Graham, IMO HTML is not a good choice if you want to provide math
formulas.  If you insist on HTML or XML it makes sense to provide the
same stuff as PDF as well.  People who prefer a printed copy will be
grateful for this.  And even if I don't, it looks awful.

Your example file 

    http://www.gtoal.com/src/dvi2html/testdoc.html

doesn't work properly here.  The problem is that you are using
absolute coordinates but Firefox allows me to change the size of the
font I'm currently using.  When I increase font size, strings
overlap.

Why do prefer HTML?  Why don't you provide PDF?  Unlike HTML, PDF is
portable.  And you can have hyperlinks to other PDF files, too.  A
good example is the hyperref documentation:

 http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/hyperref.pdf

Regards,
  Reinhard

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