General ⇒ New package — HTML generator — Commercial-use license

[Brian_D]

The multicol license recommends a license fee be paid to the LaTeX3 project or the author in the event that the package is used for commercial purposes.

Is it known whether the LaTeX3 fund received many of these license fees?

I have developed a package which generates HTML5 directly inside LaTeX, with external help from pdftotext, pdfseparate, pdfcrop, gawk, tr, and pdftocairo or ImageMagick convert for image conversion. In theory publishers and the like might want to use the package to produce high-quality printed material with an additional online version.

Since everything is done in native LaTeX until the last moment (slice the files, convert the images), things like siunitx just work (with minor limitations). Booktabs and basic hyperref are emulated, tabular works but cannot do multirow and multicolumn at the same time ( perhaps to be improved one day ), HTML has limitations where it comes to minipage support, math and picture and tikz are converted to images (would anyone like to tackle native MathML generation?), sectioning, cross-references w/ hyperlinks, floats, index w/ hyperlinks, and footnotes all work, bibliography is without hyperlinks so far but it does work, includegraphics is emulated, and currently only pdflatex is supported.

In general, most everthing you'd want for a typical journal article or book works just fine.

Once I get it documented a bit more, the licensing figured out, and the copyright registered with the government, (edit: and join TUG!) then I'll put it onto my website for review and testing. Some of it will benefit from rewriting or additional LaTeX3 conversion, and perhaps lualatex, and I have yet to create a DTX or package it for CTAN.

As a sample of the output, check the HTML source for my own website: http://BDTechConcepts.com.

[Johannes_B]

Interesting, you can read more about it in one of Frank's papers.

In general, tex4ht is used to generate HTML from LaTeX.

On the other hand, most publishers work with XML. You can have a look at the very recent talk of Kaveh, president of TUG: TeX—After 35 years, still the best solution for modern publishing

[Brian_D]

Additional information is now on the website.

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It looks like an appeal for a donation for the LaTeX3 project might be futile, but I might include it anyhow.


Brian