next up previous contents
Next: The Theory of General Up: Introduction Previous: Browser requirements

On using LaTeX2HTML

The HTML versions currently supported by major Web browser, such as Netscape, does not include markups for mathematical symbols and equations. Therefore, the only way to include these in the text is to somehow generate an image of each of them, and then inline these in the HTML document. LaTeX2HTML can do this automatically: it takes the LaTeX source code, generates the necessary images, and outputs one or more HTML documents with these images inlined. Therefore, for making an astronomical HTML document, using LaTeX2HTML is almost inevitable.

LaTeX2HTML can be used in two conceptually different ways:

I have used it in the latter way. I have written the entire document in LaTeX using the html package. This has a number of advantages: The disadvantages are:

The LaTeX source code for this document has been split up in a number of files, which the main file index.tex refers to using the \input command. All these files are in this directory.

I want 3 different versions of the document:

To make sure that they are always consistent, I have used this small C-shell script that calls latex twice, calls dvips, calls latex2html (which for some reason deletes the .dvi file), and calls gzip. Besides the command line options to 2html, it is customized through a .latex2html-init file.

When working with LaTeX2HTML, I had to struggle with a number of bugs and peculiarities in the program. These I have listed in an appendix.


next up previous contents
Next: The Theory of General Up: Introduction Previous: Browser requirements

Web Exhibition: Null Geodesics Around a Kerr Black Hole

Bo Milvang-Jensen (milvang@astro.ku.dk)
Mon Jun 17 11:54:08 MDT 1996