On 3 Aug 2001, Annie <annie@ivgate.omahug.org> wrote:
> For those of us in the Great Unwashed Masses out here, do you or anybody
> else have some quickie example latex thingies which can convert between
> raw text and vanilla html?
Um. Yes, sort of, but you've misunderstood (from my admittedly rather sparse
original message) exactly what LaTeX is, so not really.
LaTeX is a typesetting system. Well, strictly speaking it's a set of macros
that interface to another set of macros that sit on top of a typesetting
system, but that's not really the point. It's designed to typeset books
(particularly books with lots of complicated maths), but it's very simple
and intuitive for much simpler documents.
LaTeX isn't WYSIWYG -- you create your source file which is basically plain
text marked up with LaTeX commands and then run it through TeX or a compiler
such as latex2html (for HTML output) to produce whatever format you want.
The advantage of it for maintaining FAQs is that by its nature it is
structure based (and it automagically generates contents, index, bibliography
and so on, but then it can do all sorts of groovy stuff that this isn't
really the place to discuss) and, most importantly, that you can generate
lots of formats from one source file very very easily.
If you have a look at http://users.durge.org/~ngb/random/abth-faq/ you'll
find an example -- the alt.books.tom-holt FAQ. for each version (2.9, the
most recent, is probably the one to go for) the .tex file is the LaTeX
source and the .txt, .dvi, .ps and .html files are compiled from it. (The
.aux, .log and .toc files are generated during compilation and you don't
need to worry about them.)
If you don't have a LaTeX installation available, hit your sysadmin until
he gives you one. If you /are/ your sysadmin, consult http://www.ctan.org/
Cheers,
Nick
--
If you talk to God, you are praying.
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
-- Thomas Szasz, "The Second Sin"
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