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HTML Tags For Academic Printing?
meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?
I have a sneaking suspicion that when the OP is saying things like "no CSS" and doesn't mention LaTeX, s/he is actually giving specifications in a very obfuscated way -- specifications that need to be deduced. What I take from the post is that the OP wants
I'm guessing the OP has been inspired by the use of HTML for slide presentations, in the form of S5. I can see that. But the specifications, if I've deduced them correctly, are not hugely well-thought-out ones. I can kind of see someone not wanting to use LaTeX for the reasons given above, but insisting on no CSS is crazy.
In any case, the OP should certainly give slightly clearer specifications if s/he doesn't want to have people yelling "LaTeX!!!" all day.
yes, latex is nice, but it would be even better, if basic TeX would
be understood by browsers. About 10 years ago, IBM had a cool plugin called texexplorer.
The plugin would compile latex on the fly. No need to publish a PDF. It worked
pretty well for basic documents which would not rely on macros.
Still, to address the question of the submitter, it would be nice to have something like
<latex>
$\int_0^1 \frac{\sqrt{\sin(x)}}{1+x^2} \; dx$.
</latex>
It would not have to be the full latex stack but the ability to place mini latex pages into
HTML documents. Its a pity techexplorer technology seems have disappeared. If IBM would
opensource it, it could become an add-on for firefox.
But... not everything about the PDF is specified by the LaTeX source -- and the toolchain matters. For instance, a document prepared for pdflatex with pdf figures and another prepared for the latex-->dvips-->ps2pdf route (which is often necessary as a number of journal styles use some pstricks) will in general not work with the opposite toolchain. Another example is paper size; certain of these tools output either letter or A4 by default, and must be instructed on the command line (or, really, in your build scripts) when you want the other (I know you can specify paper sizes in the source, but this is lost somewhere in the toolchain).
Download ubuntu on one computer. Use apt to install kile and all its dependecies. Compile a paper written with the IEEE conference style. Now install Windows on another computer. Install MiKTeX on it and do the same. You will get similar output, but it will by no means be identical. The most noticeable thing is that margins are different.
Oh, and so far I've ignored in this discussion that different styles will use different methods for including, say, theorems. It is a pipe dream to simply change the style of a document and expect decent results. Chances are the damn thing won't even compile -- and if it does, all your beautiful theorems will look like crap because the other style expected some different markup for them.
I don't rule out that I'm doing something wrong, and if I am, I could stand to use some enlightenment. But I know that I don't use LaTeX significantly differently from anyone else I know...