[tex4ht] Bizarre bug - \def\sp{...}

[Michal Hoftich]

Quoting Hans Georg Schaathun (2016-11-01 20:19:52)
> On Tue, Nov 01, 2016 at 08:53:22AM -0700, William F Hammond wrote:
> > Unfortunately, latex.ltx (in the latex base) contains:  \let\sp=^
> 
> Ah.  I did not know.  Thanks.
> Sorry for the off-topic quation:  Does anyone know why?
> What is it used for?

I am not sure why it is in LaTeX kernel, but \sb, \sp and even \Sp are
used internally by tex4ht, so if you redefine them, you will clearly break
lot of things. 
> 
> It has been previously been claimed on this list that the objective of 
> tex4ht is to produce the same visual output in HTML as is ordinarily 
> produced in PDF/DVI.  If that's the objective, then this is a bug,
> but clearly it is ambitious.
> 

It probably is a bug, but generally, I think that it is better to not
redefine LaTeX base commands, as it might explode sometimes. It works
with pdflatex only because you don't use any package that depends on
\sp, which tex4ht does. 

Best regards,
Michal