The LaTeX Web Companion Integrating TeX, HTML, and XML

This book shows how you can publish [LATEX] documents on the Web. [LATEX] was born of the scientist's need to prepare well-formatted information, particularly with pictures and mathematics included; the Web was born of the scientist's need to communicate information electronically. This book, describes tools and techniques for transforming [LATEX] sources into Web formats for electronic publication, and for transforming Web sources into [LATEX] documents for optimal printing.

Michel Goossens is past president of the TeX Users Group. A research physicist at CERN, where the Web paradigm was born, he is responsible for LaTeX, HTML, SGML, and, more recently, XML support for scientific documents.

Sebastian Rahtz is Past Secretary of TUG, a cofounder of CTAN, creator of the TeX Live CD-ROM, and a co-author of The LaTeX Graphics Companion. He is an IT analyst at Elsevier Science Ltd.

Eitan Gurari, Ross Moore, and Robert Sutor are, respectively, the principal architects of TeX4ht, LaTeX2HTML, and techexplorer.

Eitan Gurari, Ross Moore, and Robert Sutor are, respectively, the principal architects of TeX4ht, LaTeX2HTML, and techexplorer.

Eitan Gurari, Ross Moore, and Robert Sutor are, respectively, the principal architects of TeX4ht, LaTeX2HTML, and techexplorer.

0201433117AB11042003

The aim of this book is to provide help for authors, primarily scientists, who want to invest in the Web or other hypertext presentation systems but are not living in the world of Microsoft Word or QuarkXPress. They have an investment in markup systems such as LaTeX and have special needs in fields like mathematics, non-European languages, and algorithmic graphics. The book will tell them how to make full use of the Adobe Acrobat format from LaTeX; convert their legacy documents to HTML or XML; make use of their math in Web applications; use LaTeX as a tool in preparing Web pages; read and write simple XML/SGML; produce high-quality printed pages from their Web-hosted XML or HTML pages using TeX or PDF. LaTeX as a document repository for the InternetThe World Wide Web has invaded all areas of society, and science is no exception to this rule. This should come as no surprise since the Web paradigm was born at CERN, one of the largest scientific laboratories in the world.The present ubiquitous Web interface is the result of basic research that took place in the first years of the 1990s at CERN. Before then use of the Internet had been mostly an affair of specialists. It needed the genius and insight of Tim Berners-Lee and collaborators to create a tool that allowed physicists participating in CERN's high-energy physics program but located all over the world to exchange data and information via the Internet in an intuitive and "user-friendly" way. Their work led directly to the development of the HTML language, the HTTP protocol, and the URL addressing scheme--the three basic pillars on which the Web is built. From the very beginning, the group took the farsighted decision to share their work freely with the Internet community. Then, thanks also to the appearance of the graphic interface of theMosaicbrowser, the Web paradigm was received enthusiastically by developers and users alike. The growth of the number of Web sites and users became exponential, culminating in theWeb Woodstockat CERN in May 1994. CERN, a scientific laboratory dedicated to basic research, did not have the resources to coordinate Web development further, and hence these responsibilities were transferred to the international World Wide Web Consortium W3C, which at present consists of three main components: the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT MIT, USA; INRIA INRIA, France; and Keio University KEIO, Japan. The Consortium is supported by DARPA DARPA and the European Commission EC.One lesson to be learned from the history of the advent of the Web is that basic research, in completely unexpected ways, can lead to very important and wide-ranging spin-offs for society.Although most people do not realize it, SGML (in the form of the ubiquitous lingua franca of the Web, HTML) is today without doubt the leading markup language for electronic documents. Similarly LaTeX has been used for over a decade for marking up scientific documents. Even today there is no viable alternative to print texts containing a lot of mathematics without using LaTeX. Therefore it seems reasonable to look for ways to find a (possibly) automatic procedure to translate LaTeX documents in a form that is exploitable on the Web. Conversely, documents marked up in XML and HTML should be able to benefit from the high typographic qualities of the TeX processor.Therefore in this book we explain how LaTeX can be used as the central component of an electronic document strategy for the Web. We show how you can reuse your existing LaTeX documents on the Web by translating them into HTML, and how, by using some LaTeX extension packages, you can more fully exploit the hypertext capabilities of HTML. Today HTML and Web browsers cannot deal very well with nontextual document components, such as pictures (which are translated into bitmap images) or mathematics. We also address the translation of LaTeX into P