From L A TEX to HTML and back Michel

Both LATEX and HTML are languages that can express the structure of a document, and similarities between these two systems are shown. A detailed study is made of the LaTeX2HTML program, written by Nikos Drakos, that is today the most complete utility for translating LATEX code into HTML, providing a quasi-automatic translation for most elements. A discussion of a few other tools for translating between HTML and LATEX concludes the article. 1 Similarities between LTEX and HTML HTML and LTEX are both generic markup systems, and a comparison between tags for structural elements in both cases is shown in Table 1. In most cases the di erences are trivial, seeming to indicate that, at rst approximation, translating between these two systems should not prove too di cult. The translation programs described in this article use these similarities, but in order to exploit the richness of the LTEX language as compared to HTML (especially HTML2, which has no support for tables or mathematics), an ad hoc approach has to be adopted. To handle correctly LTEX commands that have no equivalent in HTML, such elements can either be transformed into bitmap or PostScript pictures (an approach taken by LaTeX2HTML), or the user can specify how the given element should be handled in the target language.