LATEX is a very powerful and flexible typesetting package, which in addition to being freely available also is widely supported. Although the print quality of the output may be outstanding and despite the fact that high quality PDF versions of your document may be published, LATEX unfortunately lacks any direct support for creating documents readily published on the web, compatible with any graphical web-browser. (And we cannot really blame the authors of TEX and LATEX: It would be like blaming green-grocer for not selling automobiles.)
In this document, we will go through the usage of TEX4ht to publish large documents on the web. TEX4ht is a flexible extension to LATEX, making the web publishing of complex LATEX documents relatively easy. It is a combination of a standard LATEX package and accompanying post-processing utilities.
We will develop a “recipe” for post-processing LATEX documents, with navigation through sections, consistent layout and robust graphics conversion. On our way there are some obstacles, but once overwon HTML versions of your documents are readily created.
The reader is not assumed to go into detail in all the covered problems and topics, but is encouraged to spend some amount of time reading the different sections. For creating HTML versions of LATEX documents however, only knowledge of the step-by-step recipe is needed. The really enthusiastic and impatient reader may skip directly to section five.
We will also discuss some aspects of the powerful prosper LATEX package for creating delicate slides for presentations. More specifically, we want to be able to intertwine the web pages created with TEX4ht with the presentations, making it possible to refer to written material in an elegant manner on-screen.
Immediately after this introduction, we proceed with the basics of TEX4ht in section 2. The whole of section 3.1 is devoted to the process of converting special content to graphical material in the web pages, since this is the main chore with TEX4ht. In section 4 we state the long version of the “recipe” for creating good-looking HTML documents from LATEX documents. Section 5 is the short version for the impatient reader, with short and concise instructions. As mentioned above, the reader may skip directly to this: Understanding the other material is not absolutely necessary. The section describes among other things how to obtain a package with all needed files for performing the wizardry.
Section 6 deals with the aforementioned linking of Prosper documents to documents published with TEX4ht.
We also include section 7 describing how to add the official Simula cover to your LATEX document. It is included because one often needs to publish the report on the web at the same time as one creates the official report. It is therefore convenient to have the recipes for both processes at the same place.
In the 8th and last section I have included listings of important files, although one can download them from [6]. See also the short version of the recipe in section 5.
We will assume -- of course -- that TEX4ht and Prosper are installed alongside LATEX on your system.