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Subsections

   
9. Printing quality - Postcript Downloading

LaTeX2HTML produces a ".gif" image for each mathematical formula and even for the smallest expression printed in math-mode. This gives an acceptable result at screen, but have a very poor appearance when the HTML page is directly printed from the navigator (i.e. using the "Print" button of the navigator). The math-text is fuzzy in the obtained PostScript version. This can be more or less optimized but the results on the paper are always far to be perfect.

Hence it is HIGHLY ADVISED, as a deontology rule, to propose (e.g. in the introduction or at the top of the document) a way to download the true PostScript (paper) version of the document (at least for technical and scientific documentations). The interested user can then download and obtain a high quality print.

9.1 How to make the document down-loadable?

First you should copy the PostScript file of the document (obtained by LaTeX), to the HTML document directory (see above) which is created when running LaTeX2HTML.

Then you should create an hypertext link to this file. This can be done by the following syntax:

\rawhtml
Click <A HREF="document.ps">here</A> to download the 
PostScript version of the document
\endrawhtml

where document.ps is the PostScript version of the document.

NOTE: The problem is that some users have configurated their Navigator in such a way that this command do not invoke the file transfer, but a visualisation tool such as GhostView. The hypertext link thus do not have the expected behaviour for the user. Of course, the visualized file can always be saved from the vizualisation tool, but this is an indirect method which is not very satisfactory.

An easy way to escape this problem is to transform the dowloadable document into a ".tar" file (by tar -cf file.ps.tar file.ps). For .tar files, the normal behaviour of any normal Navigator should be do really activate a download dialog box as expected from the hypertext link. The syntax for the hypertext link with this ".tar" file should then be:

\rawhtml
Click <A HREF="document.ps.tar">here</A> to download the  
.tar PostScript version of the document
\endrawhtml

If somebody has a better solution to this problem, please let me know.

The effect of the two above commands can be seen in the introduction of this document (for the HTML version only, of course).


next up previous
Next: 10. Fancy things for Up: A Short Beginner-User's Guide Previous: 8. Transportability of the
Pierre BENARD
2002-06-19