Subsections


Developments: late 1997 to early 1998

Much of the work contributed to LATEX2HTML 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 LATEX handles them.

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

The aim is ultimately to support all LATEX , AMS-TEX etc. packages in the standard LATEX 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 LATEX2HTML , 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 LATEX2HTML 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 LATEX2HTML running on DOS.

Thanks go also to Fabrice Popineau for his port to Windows NT 3, and Nikos Drakos for a Windows 95 port based on V96.1h 4(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 LATEX2HTML 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!


Proposals for Future Development:

LATEX2HTML -NG

Developed by Marcus Hennecke this is a version of LATEX2HTML that addresses various issues, not currently handled in the best way by version V97.1. These include: Many of these features have been the inspiration for new code written for LATEX2HTML  V98.1.


The current version of LATEX2HTML -NG can be obtained from the developer's repository, in the directory http://saftsack.fs.uni-bayreuth.de/~latex2ht/ng-user.
Beware that the files there are not compatible with those of the same name that come with the current version of LATEX2HTML .

Extended Capabilities in Web browsers

The following areas are the subject of active development within the Web community. Limited support is available within LATEX2HTML 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.

CML:
Chemical Markup Language.

Fonts:
further support for non-standard font encodings.

Icons:
Alternative sets of icons for navigation buttons and other purposes.
For some background on these technologies read Michel Goossens' survey article ``Hyper-activity in the Web-world'' in CERN Computer Newsletter No. 227, and browse Axel Ramge's site for ideas on how they could be used with LATEX2HTML.


Ross Moore
1999-03-26