On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Sarah Graves <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi All,

I've recently been taking a look to see if there is anyway to improve the starlink latex documentation appearance, and to make it easier to write and maintain.

If anyone's interested in the results, I've put up the versions I've made of sun95 and sc21 as latex, html and pdf on:

http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~sgraves/starlink-docupdate/

This was done by creating a draft starlink.cls file so we don't have to keep replicating all the formatting defintions in every latex file, and hopefully encourage a little more separation of style and content.

I've also played about with using tex4ht instead of latex2html so we can generate html output that is better looking, easier to use and doesn't require lots of content repeated in latexonly/htmlonly sections of the texfiles.

I'm happy to go with whatever you choose.

I'm using mathjax for the maths, but tex4ht can generate images instead if mathjax isn't well supported enough.

I'm always happy to insist that people use a reasonably new browser. If it works on Safari, Chrome and Firefox that's fine with me.

But I haven't tried to integrate any of this with the build system yet. (I've just been running the commands manually, using the tex4ht provided by texlive on my computer).

The build system tweaks would be trivial (the latex2html stuff is in a single place).

It'd be great to hear what people think of this,

+100 from me. Latex2html drives me potty, as does the bizarre early decision not to use a style file for all the document templates.

Have fun with SUN/66 if you want a challenge.

Note that star2html specifically runs latex2html to create huge numbers of pages. Not sure why.

The real trick is working out how to do the work incrementally. A lot of it is a tad repetitive (but should be a bit easier now that we use PDFs everywhere) and there are older documents that don't use the standard templates [I keep meaning to "obsolete" some of the more bizarrely irrelevant documents that are currently installed; I'm thinking that SUN/20 is probably irrelevant :-) ]

Can we manage this by using star2html to do the conversion, as now, and having it look in the tex file for the usepackage{starlink} line and if it finds it it calls tex2ht directly and otherwise it does the classical latex2html conversion? That would be by far the easiest way to do this and can let me fix up a document each evening until we get to the prize of having it all done (not that I'm volunteering to do one per night).

Tim Jenness