[OS X TeX] Looking texh4t and OpenDocument feedback

[Eitan Gurari]

 > OpenOffice 2 and supports the OpenDocument format, I started playing 
 > around with tex4ht a bit. My main motivation is to get my PhD thesis
 > in a form which can be handled easily be non-Latex users. 

To achieve proper output tex4ht needs to have OpenDocument
configurations for the latex style and class files in use. If the PhD
thesis uses a local class the outcome is likely to suffer.

 > After a bit of   
 > tweaking I actually managed to generat a swx file which NeoOffice
 > could open. 

Recent versions of tex4ht provide odt files for a default.  The swx
files require the  swx command line option.

 > At the moment, this file doesn't look so nice: No   
 > graphics have been imported,

Old version of tex4ht?

 >  strange things happend with some special characters

Improper instalation of the tex4ht fonts?  Missing font support?

 >  and the first letter of every bibliography entry was cut   
 > off.

My impression the problem got solved on 22 Nov 2005.

 > have you looked at  
 > the HTML code produced by TeX4Ht, have you tried to apply a HTML- 
 > syntax checker such as HTML Tidy

TeX4ht has an option for XHTML output, so HTML Tidy is not needed.

 > I worked with TeX4ht ...
 > on documents one might call complex and I don't think that  
 > they are useful convertors. Their output is quite different from the  
 > (La)TeX output 

For tex4ht the problem was due to a lack of font support.  The
following is a quote from the bug report (25 Feb 2006).
 
   It is a half-free font: MS Arial. Best option is to get Microsoft's   
   TrueType core fonts for the web from http://  
   corefonts.sourceforge.net/. If you you really cannot find any support 
   files for Arial, I can send you my MAP and FD files. My TFM and VF   
   files are a bit special, since I try to write in Perl now a script   
   that converts TrueType to PostScript Type 1 and conserves as many   
   glyphs from the rich Unicode encoded fonts as possible. So the script
   creates directly 8r encoded PS font files, one 9z encoded with a   
   dotless j (if it's missing in the original TT font, because then it's
   artificially created from the j), and finally an "8p" encoded font   
   file that contains as many TS1/8c and expert encoding glyphs as   
   possible. 

It is a painful task to add support for fonts that are not easily and
freely available, and much more so when dealing with thousands of
fonts of which only a few are likely to be ever used.

-eitan
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