The FCP's pLaTeX Manual

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About This Manual

This manual is for the Free Curriculum Project's LaTeX to XHTML text processor: pLaTeX (Version 0.0.a, 10MAY2004),

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License."

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What is pLaTeX?

pLaTeX is the Free Curriculum Project's solution to producing both print-quality PDFs and XHTML from the same source file.

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Why pLaTeX?

Free Curriculum Project LaTeX to XHTML
          FCPLaTeXtoXHTML
           fcpLaTeX2HTML
              pLaTeX

The real reason is the play on words, but it is nice to have a plausible explanation too. We needed a manageable command line name. pLaTeX is not a general purpose converter, so we felt that calling it latex2html or similar would be misleading. Note that there is apparently an existing LaTeX related project called platex. It seems to be related to Japanese in some way, and we don't think that there will be any confusion.

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Features

pLaTeX converts my LaTeX documents to more-or-less valid XHTML. It supports paragraphs, headings, author and title as one would expect. Sort of handles blockquotes. Handles both ordered and unordered lists in an invalid way. Strips out most extraneous LaTeX commands. Handles boldface, italics and comments. Converts TeX style quotes to HTML quote tags.

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Limitations

pLaTeX does not convert arbitrary LaTeX files to XHTML. It does not work out of the box. Your LaTeX file must be specially formatted to work with pLaTeX. Because of the way LaTeX interprets whitespace into paragraphs pLaTeX requires that you limit blank lines to those required by LaTeX. You may visually simulate your more familiar use of blank lines by adding a LaTeX comment character "%" to the beginning of otherwise blank lines. pLaTeX does not try to offer a general solution to converting LaTeX files. The different command sets and visual requirements of different input files make it impossible to convert all files well. Instead, pLaTeX comes with a set of general rules for conversion, which you can customize on a per-file basis. A general list of to do items for the project follows. This things are all planned but not implemented:

Generate chapter/section/etc. numbers.
Generate internal links.
Break chapters/sections into separate pages.
Break rules out into a "per document config file."
Support description -> <ul> properly
Support enumerate -> <ol> properly
Add TeX math to MathML support (!).
Improve quote -> <blockquote> support.

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Customizing pLaTeX

pLaTeX requires customization for each input LaTeX file if any but the most crude results are to be achieved. The conversion rules currently live in the script itself. Once the ``core'' rules stabilize they will be moved into a separate file that can serve as a starting point for customization for a given LaTeX file. For now you just have to poke around the regexes at the end of the script.

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