[Tex/LaTex] Install make4ht with MiKTeX

htlatexluamake4htmiktextex4ht

I am trying to install make4ht on a system running MiKTex. The recommended instructions https://d800fotos.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/create-e-books-from-latex-tex-files-ebook-aus-latex-tex-dateien-erstellen/ are specific to TexLive and so I am looking for some help getting this setup. I believe the root of the problem is either that MiKTeX doesn't have texmf directory or I can't figure out how to run the files themselves.

Instruction summary:
I downloaded the zip files and unpacked them in the recommended directory structure:

.../texmf/scripts/lua/make4ht/[root zip extracted]

.../texmf/tex/latex/tex4ebook/[root zip extracted]

I added .../texmf/ to the roots of MikTex settings and when I click apply I see a MiKTeX maintenance dialog box scan the files.

Next to make make4ht runnable (as per the answer below) – C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\x64\make4ht.bat only contains

texlua "F:\...\texmf\scripts\lua\make4ht\make4ht" %*

Sample Tex File: eqntests.tex

\documentclass{report}  
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
        \begin{equation}
            \text{C~=~}{\frac{a}{b}}
        \end{equation}
\end{document}

To compile my tex file using make4ht I run

FOR /R %%A IN (*.tex) DO ("make4ht.bat" "%%~nxA")

But I get an error message as described: [string "Make:htlatex{}..."]:1: attempt to index global 'Make' (a nil value) .../texmf/scripts/lua/make4ht/mkutils.lua:281: assertion failed!

I appear to be missing the Make program. What required program provides the Make command?

Best Answer

I just added installation instructions to make4ht readme, I will copy Windows instructions here:

See a guide by Volker Gottwald on how to install make4ht and tex4ebook`.

Create a batch file for make4ht somewhere in the path:

texlua "C:\full\path\to\make4ht" %*

you can find directories in the path with

path

command, or you can create new directory and add it to the path.

Note for Miktex users: you may need to create texmf directory first. See this answer on TeX.sx.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to make the rmligs script available globally on Windows

My answer has nothing to do with TeX at all, but I hope to answer your question.

In order to run commands on an arbitrary folder, they need to be "known" by the operating system. How do the system know if a command is available? A search in the path. So, first things first:

Extract the content of rmligs-0.84.tar.gz to a folder. I suggest to avoid spaces in directory names. In my case, I extracted to C:\paulo\softwares\rmligs.

If I dir my directory, I have:

14/11/2002  18:54               359 BUGS
14/11/2002  19:19               466 Changes
10/01/2000  19:22               747 Copyright
02/11/1999  18:28            18.007 GPL2
28/11/1999  19:43               269 makefile
14/11/2002  20:06               699 MD5sums
18/03/2000  12:40             2.621 PGPKeys
14/11/2002  18:52             4.002 README
14/11/2002  17:12            28.799 rmligs
14/11/2002  19:55             1.641 rmligs.1
01/12/1999  09:53               791 testfile.tex
14/11/2002  19:04                 5 VERSION

Now, lets add that directory to the Windows path. As Canageek mentioned, go to Control Panel -> System and Security\System -> Advanced system settings -> Environment settings. For God's sake, take care. :) I usually prefer to change my user variables instead of the system variables, so double-click the PATH variable under user variables, go to the end of the line, type ; and add the full path we set in the previous step:

Properties

(Sorry, my Windows is in Portuguese, but I hope you get the idea)

Then click OK a bunch of times. :)

Now let's go to the command prompt:

Command 1

It didn't work ~~you bastard~~! I'll explain why. There's a system variable called PATHEXT, if I echo it (it might be different on your computer):

C:\Users\Paulo>echo %PATHEXT%
.SCM;.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC;.wlua;.lexe;.RB;.RBW

Those are the files which can be executed in the command prompt and their order. As you can see, if you have bla.exe and bla.bat in the path, the first one will be executed because it has a higher priority. Now lets add our rmligs Perl script.

Go to the rmligs directory (in my case, C:\paulo\softwares\rmligs) then create a file called rmligs.cmd (I'm a fan of .cmd instead of .bat) with the following content:

@echo off
perl %~dp0\rmligs %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

Done! Lets break it:

perl is the interpreter, %~dp0\rmligs gives the the full path to the script, and %1 to %9 are the arguments provided to the .cmd script. Great!

Now lets open another command prompt:

Command 2