HTML printing: Conversion HTML->LaTeX->dvi->Postscript

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl)
Tue, 14 Apr 92 12:00:05 GMT+0200 

Date: Tue, 14 Apr 92 12:00:05 GMT+0200
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-Id: <9204141000.AA21572@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: wei@sting.berkeley.edu (Pei Y. Wei)
Subject:  HTML printing: Conversion HTML->LaTeX->dvi->Postscript
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch

> Does there exists something like a HTML to postscript/troff/* converter?
> I'm looking for something better than ``www -n foo.html > lpr''.

Here's a simple html to latex converter using "sed". It's not complete, but it  
produces reasonable results on the W3 documentation, so I can now (at last) make a  
W3 book.  (A minor problem is that sed ignores any characters at the end of a file  
which are not followed by a final newline, and the NeXT editor sometimes generates  
HTML without the final newline.)

You have to prepend the document style you want to the output of sed. My makefile  
looks like

	echo " \\\\batchmode \\\\documentstyle{book}" > the_www_project.tex
	sed -f html2latex.sed $(THE_HTML) >> the_www_project.tex
	latex  the_www_project.tex


For a large book, I concatenate several html files, passing some of them through  
another sed file which removes the <TITLE> elements and demotes the <H1> to <H2>  
etc.  The file below italicises anchors, but in general it might be best to remove  
them altogether. The smartest thing would be to generate the TeX to make a little  
superscript reference to the page number to which a link refers.  Any TeX experts  
out there?

I'll put the "W3 Book" in postscript up for anonymous FTP shortly.


 Tim BL
__________________________________________ html2latex follows
1i\
\\begin{document}
$a\
\\end{document}
/<XMP>/,/<.XMP>/b lit
/<.XMP>/b lit
/<xmp>/,/<.xmp>/b lit
/<.xmp>/b lit
/s?&amp.?\\&?g
s?&gt.?>?g
s?&lt.?<?g
s?\\?\\backslash ?g
s?{?\\{?g
s?}?\\}?g
s?%?\\%?g
s?\$?\\$?g
s?&?\\&?g
s?#?\\#?g
s?_?\\_?g
s?~?\\~?g
s?\^?\\^?g
s?<TITLE>?\\author{Generated from the Hypertext}\\title{?g
s?</TITLE>?}\\maketitle ?g
s?<ADDRESS>??g
s?</ADDRESS>??g
s?<P>?\\par?g
s?<p>?\\par?g
s?<Hn>?\\part{?g
s?</Hn>?}?g
s?<H1>?\\chapter{?g
s?</H[0-9]>?}?g
s?<H2>?\\section{?g
s?<H3>?\\subsection{?g
s?<H4>?\\subsubsection{?g
s?<H5>?\\paragraph{?g
s?<H6>?\\subparagraph{?g
s?<UL>?\\begin{itemize}?g
s?</UL>?\\end{itemize}?g
s?<LI>?\\item ?g
s?<ul>?\\begin{itemize}?g
s?</ul>?\\end{itemize}?g
s?<li>?\\item ?g
s?<DL>?\\begin{description}?g
s?</DL>?\\end{description}?g
s?<DT>?\\item[?g
s?<DD>?]?g
s?<dl>?\\begin{description}?g
s?</dl>?\\end{description}?g
s?<dt>?\\item[?g
s?<dd>?]?g
s?<NEXTID[^>]*>??g
s?<A[^>]*>?\\it  ?g
s?</A>?\\/\\rm  ?g
: lit
s?<XMP>?\\begin{verbatim}?g
s?</XMP>?\\end{verbatim}?
s?<xmp>?\\begin{verbatim}?g
s?</xmp>?\\end{verbatim}?