Credits

Beginnings, 1993–1994

L^ATEX2HTML was written by Nikos Drakos at the Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. Several people have contributed suggestions, ideas, solutions, support and encouragement. Some of these are Roderick Williams, Ana Maria Paiva, Jamil Sawar and Andrew Cole at the Computer Based Learning Unit.

CERN

The idea of splitting L^ATEX files into more than one component, connected via hyperlinks, was first implemented in Perl by Toni Lantunen at CERN. Thanks to Robert Cailliau of the World-Wide Web Project, also at CERN, for providing access to the source code and documentation (although no part of the original design or the actual code has been used).

Robert S. Thau

has contributed the new version of texexpand. Also, in order to translate the “document from hell” (!!!) he has extended the translator to handle \def commands, nested math-mode commands, and has fixed several bugs.

Phillip Conrad and L. Peter Deutsch.

The pstogif Perl script uses the pstoppm.ps PostScript program, originally written by Phillip Conrad (Perfect Byte, Inc.) and modified by L. Peter Deutsch (Aladdin Enterprises).

Roderick Williams

The idea of using existing symbolic labels to provide cross-references between documents was first conceived during discussions with Roderick.

Eric Carroll

who first suggested providing a command like \hyperref .

Franz Vojik

provided the basic mechanism for handling foreign accents.

Todd Little

The -auto_navigation option was based on an idea by Todd.

Axel Belinfante

provided the Perl code in the makeidx.perl file, as well as numerous suggestions and bug-reports.

Verena Umar

(from the Computational Science Education Project (ORNL)) has been a very patient tester of some early versions of L^ATEX2HTML and many of the current features are a result of her suggestions.

Ian Foster and Bob Olson.

Thanks to Ian Foster and Bob Olson at the Argonne National Labs, for setting up the mailing list.

Later Developments, 1995–1996

Since 1995 the power and usefulness of L^ATEX2HTML has been enhanced significantly. The revisions later than V95.1 have been largely due to the combined efforts of many people, other than the original author. Interested users have supplied patches to fix a fault, or implement a feature that previously was not supported. Often a question or complaint to the discussion-group (see Getting Support ...) has spurred someone else to provide the necessary “patch”.

Arising from this work, special credit is due to:

Marcus Hennecke

for his many extensive revisions;

Mark Noworolski

for coordinating V95.3;

Sidik Isani

for his improvement in GIF quality;

Michel Goossens

was the driving force behind the upgrade to L^ATEX2_e compatibility, and other features developed at CERN;

Herb Swan

for coordinating V96.1 of L^ATEX2HTML, including much of the Perl code for the new features that were introduced, and for providing a series of bug-fix revisions prior to V96.1 rev-f;

Ross Moore

who has revised and extended this manual, helped design and test the segmentation strategy, and later revisions of V96.1 . Ross organised the release of V96.1 rev-g and provided many of the improvements incorporated into V96.1 rev-h.

Martin Wilck

for the initial work on implementation of frames. Also Martin did most of the work implementing the extensive citation and bibliographic features of the natbib package, written by Patrick Daly. He also provided the makeseg Perl script to create Makefiles for segmented documents.

Jens Lippmann

for organising the releases V96.1 rev-h to V98.1. Jens made significant contributions to the internal workings of L^ATEX2HTML, as well as cleaning up much of its source code.

Many others, too many to mention, contributed bug-reports, fixes and other suggestions.

Thanks also to Donald Arseneau for allowing his url.sty to be distributed with this manual. Similarly, thanks to Johannes Braams for changebar.sty.
Both of these are useful utilities which enhance the appearance of the printed manual.

Developments: late 1996 to mid 1997

During the latter part of 1996 there was much work on improving the capabilities of L^ATEX2HTML. Some of this was due to the World Wide Web Consortium's proposals for HTML 3.2, becoming a formal recommendation in November 1996, and their subsequent acceptance in January 1997. Existing L^ATEX markup for effects such as centering, left- or right-justification of paragraphs, flow of text around images, table-layout with formal captions, etc. could now be given a safe translation into HTML 3.2, compliant with a standard that would guarantee that browsers would be available to view such effects.

At the same time developers were exploring ways to enhance the overall performance of L^ATEX2HTML. As a result the current V97.1 release has significant improvements in the following areas:

image-generation

is much faster, requires less memory and inline images are aligned more accurately;

image quality

is greatly improved by the use of anti-aliasing effects for on-screen clarity, in particular with mathematics, text and line-drawings;

memory-requirements

are much reduced, particularly with image-generation;

mathematics

can now be handled using a separate parsing procedure; images of sub-parts of expressions can be created, rather than using a single image for the whole formula;

macro definitions

having a more complicated structure than previously allowed, can now be successfully expanded;

counters

and numbering are no longer entirely dependent on the .aux file generated by L^ATEX;

decisions

about which environments to include or exclude can now be made;

HTML effects

for which there is no direct L^ATEX counterpart can be requested in a variety of new ways;

HTML code

produced by the translator is much neater and more easily readable, containing more comments and fewer redundant breaks and <P> tags.

error-detection

of simple L^ATEX errors, such as missing or unmatched braces, is now performed — a warning message shows a line or two of the source code where the error has apparently occurred;

For these developments, thanks goes especially to:

Jens Lippmann

for creating and maintaining the CVS repository at https://www.github.com/latex2html/latex2html/ . This has made it much easier for the contributions from different developers to be collected and maintained as a “development version” which is kept up-to-date and available at all times. Together with Marek Rouchal he produced an extensive rewrite of the texexpand utility.

Ross Moore

for extensive work on almost all aspects of the L^ATEX2HTML source and documentation, combining code for L^ATEX, Perl, HTML and other utilities. Most of the coding for the new features based on HTML 3.2, many of the new packages, faster image-generation and the improved support for mathematics and other environments, is his work.

Marek Rouchal

for extending the former pstogif utility, transforming it into pstoimg which now allows for alternative image formats, such as PNG. Also he produced the neat configure-pstoimg script, which eases L^ATEX2HTML installation, and a rewrite of texexpand.

Marcus Hennecke

who has always been there, up-to-date with developments in HTML and related matters concerning Web publishing, and tackling the issues involved with portability of L^ATEX2HTML to Unix systems on various platforms.

Furthermore Marcus has produced L^ATEX2HTML-NG, a version of L^ATEX2HTML which handles expansion of macros in a more “TEX-like” fashion. This should lead to further improvements in speed and efficiency, while allowing complicated macro definitions to work as would be expected from their expansions under L^ATEX. (This requires Perl 5 , using some programming features not available with Perl 4 .)

Fabrice Popineau

has produced an adaptation for the Windows NT platform, of L^ATEX2HTML V97.1 .

Uli Wortmann

showed how to configure Ghostscript to produce anti-aliasing effects within images.

Axel Ramge

for various suggestions and examples of enhancements, and the code to avoid a problem with Ghostscript.

Thanks also to all those who have made bug-reports, supplied fixes or offered suggestions as to features that might allow L^ATEX2HTML to be used more efficiently in particular circumstances. Most of these have been incorporated into this new version V97.1 , though perhaps not in the form originally envisaged. Such feedback has contributed enormously to helping make L^ATEX2HTML the easy to use, versatile program that it has now become.

Keep the ideas coming!

1st L^ATEX2HTML Workshop
Darmstadt, 15 February 1997

Thanks again to Jens Lippmann and members of the LiPS Design Team for organising this meeting; also to the Fachbereich Informatik at Darmstadt for use of their facilities.

This was an opportunity for many of the current L^ATEX2HTML developers to actually meet for the first time; rather than communication by exchange of electronic mail messages.

• Nikos Drakos talked about the early development of L^ATEX2HTML, while...
• ... Ross Moore, Jens Lippmann and Marek Rouchal described recent improvements.
• Michel Goossens presented a list of difficulties encountered with earlier versions of L^ATEX2HTML, and aspects requiring improvement. Almost all of these now have been addressed in the V97.1 release, so far as is possible within the bounds inherent in the HTML 3.2 standard.
• Kristoffer Rose showed how it is possible to create GIF89 animations from pictures generated by TEX or L^ATEX, using the XY-pic graphics package and extensions.

Also present were representatives from the DANTE e.V. Praesidium and members of the development team.
In all it was a very pleasant and constructive meeting.

TUG'97 — Workshop on L^ATEX2HTML
University of San Francisco, 28 July 1997

On the Sunday afternoon (2.00pm–5.00pm) immediately prior to the TUG meeting, there will be a workshop on L^ATEX2HTML, conducted by Ross Moore¹⁴.

 Admission: $50, includes a printed copy of the latest L^ATEX2HTML manual.

TEXNortheast TUG Conference, TEX/L^ATEX Now
March 22–24, 1998, New York City

Includes a workshop/presentation by Ross Moore¹⁵.

Euro-TEX'98, 10th European TEX Conference
St. Malo, France — 29–31 March, 1998

Several of the L^ATEX2HTML developers will be present. All European (and other) L^ATEX2HTML users are encouraged to attend.

Developments: late 1997 to early 1998

Much of the work contributed to L^ATEX2HTML during this time was related to bug fixing and maintaining the 97.1 release, in order to reach a more stable and reliable version which produces HTML code conforming to the W3C standards/drafts. To keep in context with this view, support for HTML 4 has been incorporated into the translator.

There have been improvements to the way math code is handled, as well as font-changing and numbering commands. These now are expected to work much closer to the way that L^ATEX handles them.

Furthermore, missing L^ATEX style translations for basic L^ATEX and A_MS-TEX document classes were added to the distribution: book.perl, report.perl, article.perl, letter.perl, amsbook.perl and amsart.perl. New styles implementing L^ATEX packages include seminar.perl, inputenc.perl and chemsym.perl naming but a few.

The aim is ultimately to support all L^ATEX, A_MS-TEX etc. packages in the standard L^ATEX distribution, or for which there is published documentation. At the time of writing this aim has not quite been reached. To support internationalisation, Perl extensions were provided for HTML output conforming to ISO-Latin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and Unicode encodings.

All of the above work was done by Ross Moore.

Additional document formats are now supported, these are IndicTEX, FoilTeX, and CWEB documents. You may use any of these packages to translate such documents together with L^ATEX2HTML, refer to the instructions in the various README files.

Thanks go to Ross Moore for IndicTEX/HTML, to Boris Veytsman for FoilTeX/HTML and to Jens Lippmann for the CWEB to HTML translator.

Numerous discussions and efforts have been undertaken to get L^ATEX2HTML working independent from the underlying operating system. Yet all obstacles are not quite taken, but it is forseeable that we are OS independent very soon. This release has been reported to run on OS/2, DOS, and MacOS, besides Unix-like operating systems. A former version has also been ported to Amiga OS, but that results still need to be re-integrated into the source. Ports for Windows'95 and Windows NT exist, but are not yet integrated with the main distribution.

Thanks go to Marcus Hennecke, Axel Ramge, Marek Rouchal and Uli Wortmann for fruitful and refreshening discussions about that Override.pm loading scheme (which finally made its way after enough chickens and eggs chased one another to death $\smiley$  ), and to Daniel Taupin for his successful efforts to get L^ATEX2HTML running on DOS.

Thanks go also to Fabrice Popineau for his port to Windows NT, and Nikos Drakos for a Windows 95 port based on V96.1h (which is mentioned here at last, but not least).

We want to take the opportunity to thank Scott Nelson and the people at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who help to keep up the L^ATEX2HTML main archive and the mailing list, and to Achim Bohnet at the Max Planck Institut fuer extraterrestrische Physik, Garching for maintaining the list's online archive. Finally thanks and greetings to all people that contributed to this release and have not been mentioned here...

You all showed spirit and favour. Thank you for your efforts!

... and don't forget Jens and the LiPS team at Darmstadt!

1998 to 1999

During this period large parts of L^ATEX2HTML have been overhauled and compatibility with Perl 4 broken once and for all. The 99.2 release is the first known to work out of the box on several UNIX systems as well as on Windows 95, 98, NT and OS/2. The number of supported L^ATEX packages is bigger than ever.

Thanks to Adalbert Perbandt for testing every second alpha/beta release of 99.2 on OS/2 and ensuring that things work ok there.

2018

• SVG image generation
• Support for pdflatex
• Support for HTML 5

Proposals for Future Development:

Extended Capabilities in Web browsers

The following areas are the subject of active development within the Web community. Limited support is available within L^ATEX2HTML for some of these features, using the -html_version 4.0 command-line switch.

style-sheets:

proposals for a flexible mechanism to allow cascading (CSS) and DSSSL, within HTML 4.0.

XML:

eXtensible Markup Language.

MathML:

Mathematical Markup Language.

Fonts:

further support for non-standard font encodings.

Icons:

Alternative sets of icons for navigation buttons and other purposes.