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True, true. "By scratch" I erroneously meant "on top of TeX", my bad. I take that back. On the other hand, I can't help but remark on the vague sense of missed

by gone35 12y ago

True, true. "By scratch" I erroneously meant "on top of TeX", my bad. I take that back. On the other hand, I can't help but remark on the vague sense of missed opportunity in your project. I know for a fact that "authors who need everything TeX can do" are indeed interested in a streamlined TeX to web-book authoring library[1], precisely because of the lack of good HTML packages that stopped you from developing on it in the first place. An easy-to-use package like beamer but for outputting nice, responsive webbooks or articles on a whim would be a gigantic boon to the sciences. [1] There are several TeX to HTML tools out there already, but the output quality isn't that great and in any case the well-known ones are not intended specifically for webbook authoring. There's also PubMed Central's PubReader, but for specially-tagged XML articles, not TeX. See: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/43847/why-havent-any-tex-html-converters-been-updated-to-use-current-web-standards-s http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/43847/why-havent-any-...

grayclhn 12y ago
Some parts of TeX and LaTeX translate directly into a web setting, and I imagine it would be pretty straightforward to write an interpreter in Pollen/Racket that can process those parts of LaTeX files (cross references, bibliography management, etc). The rest is page layout and typography, which is what Pollen's for. So a conversion tool would probably be useful (even if it would probably choke on pgf/tikz diagrams --- presumably there are already ways to convert those to svg separately, though). But the macro language is terrible. Most of what TeX gets right are things like page layout, hyphenation, page breaks, etc., none of which are affected by changing or keeping the macro language (and all of which need to be changed for the web anyway). Besides, there are already acceptable ways of putting a LaTeX document on the web --- save it as a pdf and upload it. It's not the best way to put something online, but it's not much worse than a single long web page. Obviously, something like http://practicaltypography.com http://practicaltypography.com is much better as a website than as a collection of pdf files, but getting there from a single large LaTeX paper or book is going to take some amount of reorganization anyway. Converting the macros should be relatively easy. (especially with mathjax support)

by gone35 12y ago

grayclhn 12y ago

Some parts of TeX and LaTeX translate directly into a web setting, and I imagine it would be pretty straightforward to write an interpreter in Pollen/Racket that can process those parts of LaTeX files (cross references, bibliography management, etc). The rest is page layout and typography, which is what Pollen's for. So a conversion tool would probably be useful (even if it would probably choke on pgf/tikz diagrams --- presumably there are already ways to convert those to svg separately, though). But the macro language is terrible. Most of what TeX gets right are things like page layout, hyphenation, page breaks, etc., none of which are affected by changing or keeping the macro language (and all of which need to be changed for the web anyway). Besides, there are already acceptable ways of putting a LaTeX document on the web --- save it as a pdf and upload it. It's not the best way to put something online, but it's not much worse than a single long web page. Obviously, something like http://practicaltypography.com http://practicaltypography.com is much better as a website than as a collection of pdf files, but getting there from a single large LaTeX paper or book is going to take some amount of reorganization anyway. Converting the macros should be relatively easy. (especially with mathjax support)