Posted by Roy Schestowitz on 12/18/90 11:26

[Groups distribution reduced]

__/ [Alan J. Flavell] on Monday 12 September 2005 17:33 \__

> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> To suggest ways forward, I suggest that
>> the OP, who clearly wants to publish material on the Web, learns LaTeX.
>
> Well, this drifts somewhat off the topic of some of the crossposted
> groups, but our physicists are accustomed to writing their
> publications in some form of latex, and I can say that when I was
> handling the web-ifying of their publications, several years back, I
> was (for the most part) getting good results from a program called
> latex2html, and most problems were attributable to identifiable
> causes, none of which were usually a major hindrance. (Back then we
> had to make do with the deplorable HMTL version called HTML/3.2, but,
> aside from that, the principles seemed right).


I use latex2html almost religiously. I estimate that about 1000 pages in my
site are in one form or another a product of latex2html, which has always
produced better output than lyx2html, for example. I discussed latex2html
in depth a couple of days ago and I continue to promote it.


>> Shall the idea of editing raw text become daunting, I suggest LyX
>> < lyx.org > [LyX: Front-end to LaTeX]. 5 minutes with LyX would help
>> anyone realise the difference and convey the idea, e.g. varying
>> outputs, styles, imposition of structure, etc.
>>
>> Only a few days ago, somebody in the LyX mailing lists mentioned his
>> upcoming presentation on "Word: What you See Is What a Mess".
>
> googled!
>
> It's really the principles which count here: but in practical terms,
> I'm sure you're right in aiming at a format which promotes >doing the
> right thing< by default - as opposed to one which has prominent
> direct-formatting buttons on its user interface, and logical markup as
> an apparently advanced topic which, I'm afraid, too many of authors
> seem to disdain learning.
>
> all the best


Only last night I was in a similar position involving my supervisor who
heads the Computer Science Department [I believe it is sensible to make
this public given the nature of the discussion]. For a Windows-centric
person like himself, who uses Office almost exclusively, it was difficult
to satisfy a Linux-dominated department. Conversion of a Word document to
HTML, also to be embedded in E-mail (I must bite my tongue) was never a
good idea. The final outcome is a PDF attachment with hyperlinks. My
arguments about standards, structure-based composition and the like seem to
have led to this result, which I suspect many will be satisfied with.

Best Wishes,

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Avoid missing ball for higher score"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 74572E8E
6:10pm up 18 days 13:16, 3 users, load average: 0.66, 0.29, 0.29

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