[OS X TeX] Recommended way to install latex2html

[Michael Williams]

On 1 Jul 2005, at 04:48, Aaron Jackson wrote:
>> What is the recommended way to install latex2html these days? Has any 
>> progress been made since 
>> <http://www.tug.org/pipermail/latex2html/2003-April/002341.html>? I 
>> understand there are a large number of dependencies, but I'd like to 
>> avoid using Fink, if possible.
>
> If you install via the i-installer, you can add all the dependencies 
> that way.  Then just do
>
> ./configure
> make
> make install (as root)
>
> (after downloading and uncompressing the source of course).
>
> Not too hard.  This worked for me, but since I use tex4ht I cannot say 
> if the install works as expected.  I can only say the install was 
> trivial.

Indeed it was. Thanks. I have a natural aversion to ./configure && make 
&& make install after years of happy Debian use, so hadn't even 
considered that. For Google's benefit, the i-Packages I had to install 
(apart from TeX), were "Netpbm Tools and Library" and "PNG Library" 
(the latter is optional, but allows the generation of PNG graphics).

> Why don't you use tex4ht?

For unpleasant historical reasons. Several years ago I wrote a long 
introduction to procedural computer programming using Python as the 
teaching language. Knowing nothing but basic LaTeX at the time, and in 
the absence of a better idea, I chose to use a set of scripts that were 
used to generate the official Python documentation from LaTeX source.

As well as pretty PS/PDF output, which was all I was really after, they 
generate a HTML version using latex2html with very non-standard 
arguments. They were confused by my document, and the result has 
numerous broken equations, cross-references, etc. that I didn't worry 
about at the time. I now worry about them, not least because they 
confuse a lot of people unlucky enough to be referred to the 
documentation by Google :-(

[Anyone interested can compare the PDF 
<http://pentangle.net/python/handbook.pdf> and the
HTML <http://pentangle.net/python/handbook/>. No prizes for spotting 
errors in either.]

-- Mike

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