exit overview

### The Translation Process

The system can be activated with a sequence of commands of the following form, typically embedded within a script.
latex x (or ‘tex x’)
latex x
latex x
tex4ht x
t4ht x

The three compilations with La(TeX) are needed to ensure proper links. The approach is illustrated in the following picture.

x.tex

  This is a source TeX/LaTeX/OtherTeX ﬁle that imports the style ﬁles tex4ht.sty and *.4ht. The style ﬁles deﬁne the features for the output.

tex4ht

  The output of TeX is a standard dvi ﬁle interleaved with special instructions for the postprocessor tex4ht to use. The special instructions come from implicit and explicit requests made in the source ﬁle through commands of TeX4ht.

  The utility tex4ht translates the dvi code into standard text, while obeying the requests it gets from the special instructions. The special instructions may request the creation of ﬁles, insertion of html code, ﬁltering of pictures, and so forth.

  In the extreme case that the source code contains no commands of TeX4ht, tex4ht gets pure dvi code and it outputs (almost) plain text with no hypertext elements in it.

  The special (\special) instructions seeded in the dvi code are not understood by dvi processors other than those of TeX4ht.

x.idv

  This is a dvi ﬁle extracted from x.dvi, and it contains the pictures needed in the html ﬁles.

x.lg

  This is a log ﬁle listing the pictures of x.idv, the png ﬁles that should be created, CSS information, and user directives introduced through the ‘\Needs{...}’ command.

t4ht

  This is an interpreter for executing the requests made in the x.lg script.

### A Reﬂection at the System Messages

This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1) ⇐ invoke ‘latex x’
LaTeX2e <1998/12/01> patch level 1
Babel <v3.6x> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, n
ohyphenation, loaded.
(x.tex (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 1999/01/07 v1.4a Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(n/tex4ht.dir/tex4ht.sty)
(n/tex4ht.dir/tex4ht.sty
--- needs --- tex4ht x ---
(tex4ht.tmp) (x.xref) (n/tex4ht.dir/html4.4ht)
(n/tex4ht.dir/picmath4.4ht)
(n/tex4ht.dir/latex.4ht (n/tex4ht.dir/html4.4ht)
(n/tex4ht.dir/picmath4.4ht))
(n/tex4ht.dir/fontmath.4ht
(n/tex4ht.dir/html4.4ht)
(n/tex4ht.dir/picmath4.4ht))
(n/tex4ht.dir/article.4ht (n/tex4ht.dir/html4.4ht
) (n/tex4ht.dir/picmath4.4ht))) (x.aux)
--- file x.css ---
[1] (x.aux) )
Output written on x.dvi (1 page, 4460 bytes).
Transcript written on x.log.
This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1) ⇐ invoke ‘latex x’
LaTeX2e <1998/12/01> patch level 1
.......................
This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1) ⇐ invoke ‘latex x’
LaTeX2e <1998/12/01> patch level 1
.......................
tex4ht.c (1999-11-10-03-50) ⇐ invoke ‘tex4ht x’
(tex4ht.env)
(n/tex4ht.dir/tex4ht.fls)
(/usr/share/texmf/fonts/tfm/public/cm/cmr10.tfm)
(n/tex4ht.dir/ht-fonts/iso8859/cm/cmr.htf)
[1 file x.html
file x.css
file tex4ht.tmp
]
Execute script ‘x.lg’
t4ht.c (1999-12-30-21-14) ⇐ invoke ‘t4ht x’
Entering tex4ht.env
Entering x.lg
.......................