On May 17, 8:32pm, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> Subject: Re: latex2html: Caption placement
I don't know who the >>'s are
>
> > If latex2html is to port latex documents to html, i believe
> > it should follow the same style conventions.
>
> no. definitely not. html doesn't (intrinsically, at least) have a
> concept of page, and latex is definitely designed with page models in
> mind. as a result, some things *have* to differ (for example,
> placement of footnotes, per-page numbering of footnotes): you just
> cannot get away from that.
>
> whether this should extend to moving captions is a difficult point,
> but it's not one that can be dismissed that way.
>
> note, of course, that *many* journals require that table captions
> appear above the table.
>
> robin
Hmmm. I would say that HTML has a very definite
concept of pages (hense "webpage"). That is not to say that
all page related concepts match well with HTML page concepts
though. To me, HTML pages should be longer (contain more text)
than paper pages from the same source. Also, while I rather
like footnotes at the bottom of the page in paper, I prefer
seperate footnot pages for HTML. Basically I feel that slavish
imitation of the paper form in HTML is wrong, but that there
are design ideas in paper layout that shouldn't be dropped
in HTML. To me this is very much a (La)TeX point of view.
I'ld love to be able to make one document, and run one command
on it giving a switch at run-time which determines whether
the output is HTML or ps.
As for captions, why not have the anchor for the
graphic written before the graphic (where it should be) and
the caption written either before or after the graphic as
a configurable option. Basically, make the script write
something that correctly handles what "see Fig. 7" means.
In paper text, we don't mean "Look at the caption of figure
7", we mean "look at figure 7" and we put a caption there to
help explain the picture. That the label "Fig. 7" and the
explaination are in the same place is an artifact of paper.
I'm sure I'm not the only one whose thought of that,
and I haven't looked at the code, so I imagine it is non-trival
to do. But based on the amount of traffic about this idea,
it might be a nice change for someone to make.
Doug
