Hi

I know the current LaTeX documentation is converted to HTML using tex4ht (I think). The conversion to HTML has always produced sub-optimal results.

I was browsing through the Ubuntu APT repository and came across this program: HeVea

From there website it seems quite promising for LaTeX to HTML

conversion. As anybody tried this product before on the FPC documentation?

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~maranget/hevea/

Regards,
- Graeme -

At least it was discussed before:
http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lists/fpc-devel/2008-May/013793.html

Vincent

In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:

grep -i hevea in the doc directory would answer that question

However, note that it's been used a _long_ time ago if my memory serves well (under Win32 platform in particular, IIRC) and that the associated Hevea specific files in FPC repository may be considerably outdated.

Tomas

It is 100% certain that the keywords feature - needed for the Lazarus IDE - will not work with hevea.

Michael.

In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:

I know the current LaTeX documentation is converted to HTML using tex4ht (I think). The conversion to HTML has always produced sub-optimal results.

Btw, what are the problems with the current set on the site?

Michael,

I know you are a BIG LaTeX fan, so it will be a hard sell to change to anything else. :-) Anyway, here might be another solution. Ever heard of PanDoc? It's a document parser that can convert from many text formats to many other text formats.

Here is one example (and where I found out about PanDoc). The author Scott Chacon wrote and published a book called "Pro Git". You can purchase it on Amazon. Apress has since released the book under the Creative Commons license. So the author placed the original content on GitHub.

Pro Git: http://github.com/progit/progit

Amazingly, the complete book was written in MarkDown text formatting. They used a small script which use PanDoc to generate a LaTeX output and then processes that to a PDF. They also processed the original MarkDown to HTML output - viewable on the website.

In both cases (PDF and HTML), they are very readable and easy to navigate. I don't know PanDoc, but judging by the output it generate for the Pro Git book, I am quite impressed.

Pro Git HTML book is online at:
http://progit.org/book

Pro Git PDF book from LaTeX is at:
http://netsoc.tcd.ie/~duairc/progit.en.pdf

You can obviously generate your own PDF version if you have PanDoc and LaTeX installed.

Anyway, I just thought I would mention this. But for the FPC documentation, I still prefer the PDF versions. The have a clean layout, easy to use with hyperlink support and searchable. Now I only need to find a local printer in South Africa so I can get actual hard-copies of them. I have a lot of eBooks I would like hard-copies of. :-(

Regards,
- Graeme -

Pandoc is far too weak. The FPC docs use LaTeX to the fullest. Anything claiming to convert a 'subset' is simply unusable.

Michael.