Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: Another question

[Ralf Hemmecke]

> > If for the purpose of translating that file to html you provide
> > an appropriate axiom.sty (and axiom.4ht) which can be different
> > from the current existing axiom.sty, then I believe that should
> > be doable.
>
> Sorry, I've forgotten most of what I once knew about tex4ht. :)
> Of course we want only one source file from which to generate all
> of the dvi, ps, pdf and html. I presume that the required changes
> to 'axiom.sty' can be made compatible with all these formats?
>
> What is axiom.4ht? Can it be present in the source .tex even
> if I just run latex to get the standard dvi, ps, and pdf?

If you latex the .pamplet.tex file then (of course) latex does not know 
about axiom.4ht and ignores it completely. So nothing will change.

Now, htlatex... that does invoke latex, too, but before the 
\documentclass of the file is touched, several tweaks specific to tex4ht 
are done. One of that is that whenever you have a \usepackage{blah} it 
reads the file blah.sty and later also blah.4ht if that is there. (I 
hope, I remember that correctly.)

Normally tex4ht is clever enough so that you simply don't need the .4ht 
file. In ALLPROSE, however, I have these colored environments done with 
the "framed" package which did not work with tex4ht. Fortunately, it was 
quite easy to find an equivalent for the html output. That I have 
written into allprose.4ht. See Chapter 26 or the ALLPROSE documentation.

Anyway, forget about the, .4ht until something does not htlatex. Then 
post to the list and to Eitan Guari. He tries to be quite responsive in 
such matters. I really don't know why the LaTeX people haven't included 
tex4ht in normal TeX distributions. Tex4ht is really quite powerful 
because it uses the tex machine.

> > Let's press the html button.
>
> You mean metaphorically speaking ... :)
>
> I the case of the Axiom Wiki this action actually takes place
> during the 'Save' button processing. The 'html' link on the
> header line would be just that - a link to the html file
> previously generated by htlatex.

Oh, if that is done this way, no problem. Of course it is better to 
cache the html output.

> > Then noweave is called to produce .tex.
> > Then htlatex is called to produce .html.
> > (you might want to call makeindex/bibtex... in the middle)

> When generating .html with embedded images for the formula
> where do the image files go? Subdirectory? Since there will
> be multiple pamphlet files on the wiki, we must take care
> where to put the bits and pieces.

Ehm.... the html target in ALLPROSE looks like

html: tex4htlatex tex4htpostproces docdir
        $(CP) $(projectname)*.html $(DOCDIR)
        $(CP) $(projectname)*.css  $(DOCDIR)
        -$(CP) $(projectname)*.png  $(DOCDIR)
        @echo
        @echo "$(HTMLVIEWER) $(DOCDIR)/$(projectname).html &"
        @echo

So everything is output in the directory where you process the file 
$(projectname).tex. Then I simply copy them to the place I want them to be.

By the way, if you look at the toplevel Makefile, you'll realize that I 
don't call htlatex. The version of tex4ht that I get with debian sarge 
did not meet my needs. Meanwhile I had conversations with Eitan and some 
other guy who improved htlatex and friends quite a lot. I don't know, 
however, whether this is already released.

> > I don't see the problem except that tex4ht sometimes needs
> > a little help if strange commands appear in the LaTeX text.

> Yes, as I recall this is were we ran into some trouble. The Axiom
> pamphlet files contain a lot of tex neologisms which are acceptable
> to latex but the author of tex4ht, Eitan Gurari, considers need
> not be accepted by tex4ht.

> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2005-10/msg00233.ht
> ml

> So it seems that to get reliable HTML this way, we may need to
> upgrade the standard of LaTeX used in the Axiom pamphlet files.

Well, maybe we should start with dhmatrix. I somehow agree with you and 
Eitan. Writing TeX should not be considered the best way of writing a 
.pamphlet file. LaTeX is so much more structured that it is easier to 
convert to other formats. One cannot do all the TeX tricks and outputs 
equivalent HTML. Page numbers is one thing that you don't need in html.

Anyway, would it be a good start to take dhmatrix. We could tex->latex 
it while we try to get an html out of it.

And... perhaps we should first forget about mathml. I think the .png 
generation is the easier way to go.

> I am willing to give this a try. But I am probably going to need
> some help. :)

Well, do we have an svn branch for that? I just want to say "svn update" 
and "htlatex dhmatix" (or better make dhmatrix.html). Once we have some 
experience with compiling dhmatrix, we could cary on for the other 
files. Then you could try to write a python wrapper to get it into 
mathaction.

Let us also forget for a moment about the \begin{axiom} ... \end{axiom} 
environments. Just translating them as verbatim would be fine.

Later, I think, one needs a script that runs over the .pamphlet.tex 
file, extracts the content of the environment, writes it out to a 
file/several files axiom.somenumber.input, and at the same time modifies 
the environment \begin{axiom} ... \end{axiom} to 
\begin{axiomoutput}{somenumber} ... \end{axiomoutput} and writes a file 
.pamphlet.ax.tex.
Then run axiom and produce files axiom.somenumber.tex (maybe a script is 
involve here to split the axiom output into its parts -- but that you 
know already from mathaction, I guess).
After that call htlatex on the generated .pamphlet.ax.tex file. The 
\begin{axiomoutput}{somenumber} ... \end{axiomoutput} environments 
should simply ignore there content and set the content of the file 
axiom.somenumber.tex.

Doesn't sound un-doable to me.

Ralf