[tex4ht] htxelatex support for unicode and multiple scripts

[Radhakrishnan CV]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 4:25 AM, Alexandre Roberts <
alexandre.roberts at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear tex4ht list members,
>
> I am about to begin drafting the first chapter of my dissertation in
> Byzantine and Middle Eastern history. This is the moment when I will commit
> to the format I will use for writing my entire dissertation. I want it to
> be XeLaTeX/BibLaTeX, but unless I can come up with a simple workflow for
> converting the content of my documents to Word format -- the only format
> that publishers in my field accept -- I will have to give this up and turn
> to Word/Endnote or Mellel/Bookends for the next three years.
>

As far as I understand, TeX4ht won't support fontspec or XeLaTeX
technologies of using system fonts that do not have *.tfm's. In effect, by
adopting TeX4ht, one is likely to loose the features brought in by XeTeX.
However, here is another approach.

   1. We translate all the Unicode character representations in the
   document to Unicode code points in 7bit ascii which is very much palatable
   to TeX4ht. A simple perl script, etf2ent.pl in the attached archive does
   the job.
   2. We run TeX4ht on the output of step 1.
   3. Open the *html in a browser, I believe, we get what you wanted. See
   the attached screen shot as it appeared in Firefox in my Linux box.

Here is what I did with your specimen document.

   1. commented out lines that related to fontspec package from your
   sources named as alex.tex.
   2. added four lines of macro code to digest the converted TeX sources
   3. ran the command: perl utf2ent.pl alex.tex > alex-ent.tex
   4. ran the command: htlatex alex-ent "xhtml,charset=utf-8,fn-in" -utf8
   (fn-in option is to keep the footnotes in the same document). I have used a
   local bib file, mn.bib as I didn't have your bib database. biber was also
   run in the meantime to process the bibliography database.
   5. open the output, alex-ent.html in a browser. I got it as you see in
   the attached alex.png.

Hope this might help you.
Best regards

-- 
Radhakrishnan
River Valley<https://maps.google.com/maps?q=River%20Valley,%20Thiruvananthapuram%20Neyyardam%20Road,%20Kerala,%20India&vector=1>
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