From LATEX to HTML and

Both L A T E X 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 L A T E X code into HTML, providing a quasi-automatic translation for most elements. A discussion of a few other tools for translating between HTML and L A T E X concludes the article. HTML and L A T E X 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 diierences are trivial, seeming to indicate that, at rst approximation, translating between these two systems should not prove too dii-cult. The translation programs described in this article use these similarities, but in order to exploit the richness of the L A T E X 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 L A T E X commands that have no equivalent in HTML, such elements can either be transformed into pictures (an approach taken by LaTeX2HTML), or the user can specify how the given element should be handled in the target language. Before discussing the LaTeX2HTML program, we want to mention a few other programs. First there is l2x 1 , written by Henning Schulzrinne (Berlin, Ger-many), which translates L A T E X into various other formats. This program is written in C and calls a Tcl function (Ousterhout 1994) for each L A T E X command. A converter html.tcl is available for translating L A T E X les into HTML, by writing, for instance: l2x-p html.tcl article.tex Presently, only a subset of all L A T E X commands are handled (no mathematical formulae, tables, verbatim texts, etc.), yet it is not too diicult to augment the code of the converter html.tcl by introducing new Tcl commands. has developed Hyperlatex 2 , a little package written in the GNU Emacs Lisp language to translate documents marked up in (a subset of) L A T E X into HTML. Although not directly relevant to L A T E X, it is nevertheless interesting to mention the existence of tex2RTF 3 , a program …