[tex4ht] why arxiv.org choose LaTeXML and not tex4ht for making HTML pages?

[Michal Hoftich]

Hi Nasser,

> The have an example there also of a paper converted to HTML.
> I do not see anything in there that tex4ht can't do.
>

It most likely can do, but as Deyan said, LaTeXML developers were
using ArXiv for their testing. I have more reports from TeX4ht users
than I can process, so I don't have too much time and energy left for
such a project. It would be interesting to check how TeX4ht would
handle it, though. So if someone could test it, I would be glad to
hear about it.

> Any thoughts if someone knows more about this, why they choose
> LaTeXML over tex4ht for making the HTML? The math in those pages
> seems to be rendered also by mathjax, which tex4ht supports.
>
> Are their technical reasons for this choice? What can LaTeXML do
> which tex4ht can not?
>
I think LaTeXML uses a different approach than TeX4ht for the
conversion, so while we can easily support custom commands and
packages, or translate chunks of the document to pictures, we are also
more likely to get fatal errors because of package clashes. So just
using a package  in your document (for example, recently I had to fix
the PDFX package), can lead to a fatal error. This can be difficult to
debug for a lot of users, and even more problematic if you have
thousands of documents from various users, all of them using random
packages. You will just get a big number of documents that fail.

Best regards,
Michal