[Tex/LaTex] Why haven’t any TeX->HTML converters been updated to use current web standards/style

conversionhtmllatex2htmltex4ht

I think that updating these converters would help TeX stay relevant as a document processing language. In these last few years, web development has really skyrocketed. CSS3 has brought along a lot of support for rich typography on the web as well as hyphenation using TeX algorithms. There are also a lot of APIs and tools for typography and math. The web is catching up with typesetting; it will never be the same as PDF, but it's worth updating these tools for better conversion of LaTeX to web documents.

There are many advantages to web pages

  • Loads faster than PDF
  • Available across devices and browsers (no need for a PDF reader), including mobile
  • By using the MathJax API, you can have high-quality typography for math expressions, with scaling and easy exporting of LaTeX and MathML
  • By embedding/popup/linking math expressions to WolframAlpha, equations retain their symantic encoding, and expressions/documents become interactive
  • You can link to specific parts of the document externally and internally (you could convert TeX tags to support this)
  • Tikz and metapost pictures can be translated to SVG, enabling adding good looking and scale-able diagrams and illustrations
  • Tool tips, alt-tags, hover-icons, animations, etc. which could potentially aid usability/accessibility

I'm new to TeX and StackExchange, and I don't have the programming chops to develop something like this, but maybe someone out there is interested in a project like this. Eitan Gurari's software is orphaned and needs someone to take on the challenge of continuing projects like this.

(The tag TtH might also belong here, but I couldn't add it. It's a single C file program to convert TeX to html)


Edit: Based on the current responses, I just want to clarify my question. TeX is for pretty-printing. I haven't seen a single example of converted TeX->HTML actually look good, and math is usually converted into ugly HTML or images. It's probably possible to bundle resources to take the output of the tools and style them, but I was hoping to at least see an example of this done attractively–or, better yet–a converter that actually pretty-prints a webpage similar to how LaTeX does to DVI/PDF.

Best Answer

Lot of the things that are on your list are already implemented:

  • tex4ht can produce xhtml with mathml
  • tex4ht can produce SVG figures from tikz/pgf figures
  • METAPOST already outputs SVG out of the box
  • Linking to parts of your documents is done by the hyperref package, for pdf and html/xhtml.

Connecting to Wolfram|Alpha is surely not a "web standard", and may be difficult, since math in TeX is mostly described in a "presentation", rather than semantic way. On the other hand, it should be possible to do it for each individual equation using the hyperref package. I do not really see any way to do it automatically.

I know it is possible to produce tooltips and include animations in a pdf document, I am not sure how would that work when converting to html.

Related Question