[texhax] [pdftex] DVI to HTML mechanism demo

[Chris Rowley]

Hi Graham

Good to hear fom you!

> What I want is this:imagine you're using pdfTeX, and your browser has
> the pdf viewer plugin installed so that pdf pages are displayed
> embedded in the web browser rather than in an external helper app like
> Acrobat Reader.  Then imagine this embedded pdf file as showing just
> the document without any of the messy framing and unnecessary clutter
> that the pdf plugins have.

I agree that this sounds nice but personally I barely notice the
extras from the pdf viewer.

The more specific idea of using HTML to describe fixed format material
is simply not fashionable.

Moreover, there are good reasons for allowing a certain amount of
user-control over the appearance of information to be displayed on
screens: differently-sized screens (inludinng these days moblie
devices: yes I have seen TeX-typeset maths displayed on a phone!,
different user requirements for text size and colour, ...).

Of course it would be good to have a system in which Sebastian can
happily write his XML (by hand:-) which is then (for those who would
like it that way) processed by a document formatter, with far better
aesthetic standards than TeX, into XHTML that is of the highest quality
and provides the correct amounts of author/editor- vs reader- control. 

But that requires, inter alia, making TeX-like processing available in
software that concurrently manipulates the objects in a DOM-like
structure.  [BTW: Such software would also produce far superior (to
any variant of the TeX paradigm) results for paper-style publication.]

Cheers,  chris