While the conditional commands in the html.perl package are great when
choosing which code to process depending on latex2html or LaTeX2e are
being used, I sometimes need conditional processing when processing
with LaTeX2e. I assume html.perl can't do general purpose conditional
processing with LaTeX2e?
I have a partially complete implementation of ifthen.perl to support
\ifthenelse{condition}{cond true commands}{cond false commands}
One thing that stymies me is that the parameter sent to
do_cmd_ifthenelse is delimited by the next \section/\subsection
Yes; LaTeX2HTML calculates the document-structure before it expands
macros. So this can never work.
Essentially you have one document for when the condition is 'true' and
a different document for when the condition is 'false'.
If the condition changes according to the contents of the LaTeX source,
then LaTeX2HTML will not know this at the correct time.
(Your model is then of document-content determining document-structure;
this is very much against the tree-like structure of HTML and XML documents.)
On the other hand, if it changes according to some externally-supplied
input; e.g. something that is set once in the LaTeX preamble, and never
changes after this, then you can use Perl coding to set declarations
that will enable you to handle it.
e.g.
Study comment.sty with its conditional 'comment' environments.
Surround your conditional sections by comment-like environments.
Develop the logic to handle \includecomment and \excludecomment
commands.
Alternatively, your conditional sections could be \input from separate
files. Adjust the values of $DO_INCLUDE and $DONT_INCLUDE within the
.latex2html-init file, before starting the LaTeX2HTML job.
command. This produces problems if you want to conditionally process a
section, i.e.
\ifthenelse{\boolean{dothissection}}
{
\section{This is a section that will be processed if dothissection is
true}
And it's contents.
}
{
\section{This is a section that will be processed if dothissection is
false}
And it's contents.
}
I assume that ifthenelse needs to be processed via
substitute_meta_cmds since according to the documentation, these are
processed prior to splitting the input text into chunks at section
boundaries?
Yes; I suppose that is an alternative approach.
But it all depends upon what determines when you want the sections included
or not included. If it is something that will not be known until detailed
expansion of macros has taken place, then you are out of luck.
If it depeneds on some global parameter that is known at the very start of
the job, then there is almost certainly a better way to organise your LaTeX
sources that makes the relevant logic easier to handle.
The other issue raised in a previous mail list posting by Ross is it
seems booleans are not guaranteed to expand in the same way in
latex2html than in LaTeX, I can live with/work around that, although
fairly simple set of commands like
\newboolean{condition}
\setboolean{condition}{true}
\boolean{condition}
in 1.70 of latex2html.pin always produce 0. I've sent the changes to
Ross to fix those bugs in \boolean processing. However, am I correct in
assuming latex2html-2002-2-1.tar.gz is still the latest release?
Yeah; sorry.
I've been too busy to make those changes generally available.
I'd need to study examples to ensure that they work correctly,
and establish guidelines on just what working correctly actually means.
As my above comments indicate, use of \ifthenelse is not a good idea for
controlling document structure.
I don't want to make such commands available, and then have to field dozens
of complaints that users are not getting what they expected to get.
This is the surely the real reason why these commands were never implemented
years ago. (Giving unexpected wrong results is worse than giving no results
at all, for this kind of thing.)
The link http://saftsack.fs.uni-bayreuth.de/~latex2ht/current/ from
www.latex2html.org lists all files as written on the 29th of November
2002, I assume the other ones cover releases in 1999 (i.e
latex2html-99.2beta8.tar.gz) and 2000 (latex2html-2K.1beta.tar.gz)?
Do I understand that to mean latex2html-2002-2-1.tar.gz does not change
it's name when updates have been made, or that no changes have been
made since the 2002-2-1 release?
I'm sorry for all the questions, but the version numbering in the name
of the tarball seems non-standard. Also, am I correct in assuming that
the CVS repository itself is not accessible but only a checked out
distribution accessible at
http://saftsack.fs.uni-bayreuth.de/~latex2ht/user/?
With Marek Rouchal returning after a long absence, the anonymous CVS
logins may become accessible again soon.
THanks for your interest, and hopefully there will be more time
in the New Year to make further improvements to LaTeX2HTML.
All the best,
Ross Moore
In any
