Thanks again to Ross Moore and Greg Gamble for your thoughtful and
informative answers to my questions about customizing the background color
and changing minor aspects of the headings.
Changing background color seems easily doable by several methods:
Greg suggested adding a line to the .latex2html-init file, such as:
> $BODYTEXT = "text=\"\#000000\" bgcolor=\"\#FFFFFF\"";
Ross suggested using LaTeX's color package or \htmlbody:
> \usepackage{html}
> \usepackage[dvips]{color}
> \begin{htmlonly}
> \pagecolor{...} % sets the background color
> \color{...} % sets the text-color
> \end{htmlonly}
>but then if you are loading html.sty you could use \bodytext
>or (better) \htmlbody to set/alter the attributes in the <BODY...> tag.
>There are other more complicated things that you can do using {rawhtml}
>or \HTMLcode .
I intend to experiment with all these methods-- thanks!
In addition, Ross wrote:
> Visual aspects should be handled using Stylesheets,
> for which there are several languages.
>
> CSS1 is suggested for HTML 4.0 and is supported pretty well by the
> latest versions of Netscape 4.0x and MSIE;
> CSS2 is less well supported.
> In both cases the support varies according to the platform
> (PC, Mac, X-windows, etc.)
>
> LaTeX2HTML creates a stub stylesheet named <name>.css
> (using the name of your document) which can be easily edited,
> if you know a bit about CSS .
>
> If you use latex2html -html_version 4.0 then the .css file allows
> for more places where stylesheet information can be applied,
> with any extra editing in either the LaTeX source or the HTML pages.
>
> LaTeX2HTML also provides a mechanism, provided you \usepackage{html},
> for creating the stylesheet entries automatically, from information
> included within the LaTeX source.
>
> My advice would be to process one or two of your documents with
> no changes at all, but using
>
> latex2html -html_version 4.0 ......
>
> Then open the .css file in an editor and experiment with style-changes,
> to find those which best suit your documents.
> When you know precisely what HTML and CSS code you want,
> then we can determine the best way to use these with all the rest of
> your documents, with minimal editing.
...
> I'd be interested to see the results you get, using CSS stylesheets.
The CSS stylesheets sound extremely useful for what I'd like to do. At the
moment our campus browsers just use html version 3.2, but I expect we'll be
upgrading before too long. I know nothing about CSS, so I guess I have a lot
of learning to do. Can you suggest where I might find introductory
instruction in the language? I'll first try the command you suggest above,
and see what the .css file looks like. I'll certainly let you know what
progress I make with the style sheets, but sounds like I need html 4.0 and a
lot of learning first.
Thanks again for all the information!
-Harriet
