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4 Trying it out

For those who don't read manuals, here are a few hints to allow you to use Hyperlatex quickly.

Hyperlatex implements a certain subset of LaTeX, and adds a number of other commands that allow you to write better HTML. If you already have a document written in LaTeX, the effort to convert it to Hyperlatex should be quite limited. You mainly have to check the preamble for commands that Hyperlatex might choke on.

The beginning of a simple Hyperlatex document ought to look something like this:

  \documentclass{article}
  \usepackage{hyperlatex}
  
  \htmltitle{Title of HTML nodes}
  \htmladdress{Your Email address, for instance}
  
      more LaTeX declarations, if you want
  
  \title{Title of document}
  \author{Author document}
  
  \begin{document}
  
  \maketitle
  
  This is the beginning of the document...
Note the use of the hyperlatex package. It contains the definitions of the Hyperlatex commands that are not part of LaTeX.

Those few commands are all that is absolutely needed by Hyperlatex, and adding them should suffice for a simple LaTeX document. You might try it on the sample2e.tex file that comes with LaTeX2e, to get a feeling for the HTML formatting of the different LaTeX concepts.

Sooner or later Hyperlatex will fail on a LaTeX-document. As explained in the introduction, Hyperlatex is not meant as a general LaTeX-to-HTML converter. It has been designed to understand a certain subset of LaTeX, and will treat all other LaTeX commands with an error message. This does not mean that you should not use any of these instructions for getting exactly the printed document that you want. By all means, do. But you will have to hide those commands from Hyperlatex using the escape mechanisms.

And you should learn about the commands that allow you to generate much more natural HTML than any plain LaTeX-to-HTML converter could. For instance, \pageref is not understood by the Hyperlatex converter, because the HTML has no pages. Cross-references are best made using the \link command.

The following sections explain in detail what you can and cannot do in Hyperlatex.

Practically all aspects of the generated output can be customized.


Otfried Schwarzkopf, September 2, 1997

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