1. Introduction

This is a short expectedly "easy to read" document for describing the utilisation of "LaTeX2HTML" as a user, and mainly intented for beginners.

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1.1 Generalities

There is a boring "Installer/Administrator/Reference/User's Guide" by Nikos Drakos, but it is quasi-impossible to read for a normal people, and most of people are only users (... and normal !).

This is why a very simple User's Guide for beginners is proposed here, which purpose it to help beginners to create **SIMPLE** HTML documents.

To create more complicated documents, the reader should read a more complete material.

1.2 Why using LaTeXtoHTML ?

Nowadays, our bosses want us to write both PAPER and ELECTRONIC versions of our various documentations. Usually, our technical and scientific documentaions are written in LaTeX , which is a good way to handle complicated mathematical formulae.

Assuming the paper version is written in LaTeX, the software LaTeXtoHTML is a way to automatically translate the "file.tex" latex source file into a "file.html" HTML source file, which more or less will reflect the appearance of the paper documentation but in a way more suitable for "screen reading".

The advantage of HTML form of documentations can be easily understood by the example of the ARPEGE's code documentation (print of Fortran.f90 files vs. GCO's Source Navigator web page): The interactivity of the documentation makes it much more powerful. Another advantage is that it is likely to be accessible for more (possibly distant) people.

Both LaTex and HTML source files are ASCII files, and we could imagine to have both versions maintained separatety, but this would need to do twice the maintenance of the documentation, a job that people are usually reluctant to serioulsly do even only once!

Using LaTeXtoHTML for producing both PAPER and ELECTRONIC documentation is a way to have both documentations maintained from a single source code. This source file still named "file.tex" can be viewed as a latex source code with HTML directives inside it.

Schematically, the file is processed normally by LaTeX (with HTML directives ignored) to produce a paper documentation, and the same file is processed by LaTeXtoHTML using the specific directives for optimizing the appearance and allowing interactivity in the HTML page.

1.3 Navigation

The possibility to "navigate" in the document is achieved by the existence of "Hyperlinks", which are areas of the page where the user can click to access more detail through a link to another part of the documentation or even to somewhere else.

Two kind of hyperlinks can be distinguished:

Active text (hypertext):

This is a short part of the text which is "highlighted" (i.e. underlined and with a color different from the normal text).

Cliking on this HyperText activates a link to another location.

This feature is decribed below

Active image:

This is an image where the pointer becomes a "hand" when moved in the image frame. This is to indicate that the image is active.

Cliking in this image also activates a link to another location.

This feature is decribed below

Note: There are more complex behaviours like mapping parts of the image to activate several links according to the location where the user clicks in the frame, but this advanced feature is not described here, since it should not be useful for a documentation.