TeX2page is invoked in much the same way as TeX.1
For instance, given a plain-TeX document file
wherever-it-is/jobname.ext, which can
be either a full pathname or a pathname relative to either the
working directory or some directory in TEXINPUTS, where
jobname is the basename of the file
and .ext is its extension, you type
tex wherever-it-is/jobname. extat the operating-system command line.2 You do not need to mention the extension
.ext if it is .tex. This creates the output DVI file,
jobname.dvi, in the working directory.3
TeX2page is called analogously. To create the HTML
version of the same file
wherever-it-is/jobname.ext, type
tex2page wherever-it-is/jobname. extAgain, the
.ext is optional if it is .tex. This
creates jobname.html in the working directory.
To try this out, call TeX2page on the example file
story.tex
provided in all TeX distributions:
tex2page storyTeX2page will get cracking4 on
story.tex, providing
the following commentary, or log, on your console:
This is TeX2page, Version 20170129 (ECL 16.1.3 Linux) Sun, Jan 29, 2017, 1:53 am UTC−5 (story.tex) ! Missing \end inserted. [0] Output written on story.html (1 page).
TeX2page is now done, and the result of its labors
is the HTML file
story.html (click
to see).
The log file story.hlog
contains a copy of the above log, and is useful
if you didn’t or couldn’t keep track of the console
(perhaps because the log was too long).
The log says that story.tex lacked a
document-ending command such as \end (or \bye)
and that TeX2page assumed one anyway. Also, only
one HTML page was created, and its name is
story.html. TeX2page could in some cases produce
auxiliary HTML pages in addition to
the main HTML page jobname.html (especially
for larger documents). The auxiliary HTML pages
are reachable from jobname.html
by navigation links (p. 4). As each
auxiliary HTML page is completed, the log will show the
bracketed numbers [1], [2], etc. The [0]
in this log refers to the only HTML file created, viz.,
story.html.
All this is of course almost exactly analogous to the
way you type tex story (or luatex story or xetex story or pdftex story) to get
story.dvi (or story.pdf)
from story.tex, with the log going into
story.log.
This is LuaTeX, Version 1.0.4 (TeX Live 2017/Debian) (format=luatex 2018.5.10) 3 JUL 2018 07:38
restricted system commands enabled.
**story
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/plain/knuth-lib/story.tex [1{/var/lib/texmf/f
onts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}])
*\end
</usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmbx10.pfb></usr/s
hare/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr10.pfb></usr/share/tex
live/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmsl10.pfb>
Output written on story.pdf (1 page, 35962 bytes).
PDF statistics: 20 PDF objects out of 1000 (max. 8388607)
13 compressed objects within 1 object stream
0 named destinations out of 1000 (max. 131072)
1 words of extra memory for PDF output out of 10000 (max. 100000000)
The only real difference is
that TeX will not add the missing \end on its
own, but instead waits for the user to supply it
explicitly from the console.5 Note that the bracketed numbers now refer
to the pages as numbered in the printed document.
Thus, from one TeX source file, you can get both a printable .dvi and a
browsable .html document, using the same calling
conventions.
When TeX encounters a filename f, it
searches for it
in a standard list of
directories, which can be modified by the user via the
environment variable TEXINPUTS.
The filename f.tex is tried before
f itself is tried. In most modern TeXs, the
search is performed using the kpathsea library.
TeX2page also looks for files using the same kpathsea
mechanism as TeX. However, it first looks at a
different list of search directories given in the environment
variable TEX2PAGEINPUTS.
It may be useful to have
files in TEX2PAGEINPUTS shadow files from
TEXINPUTS, because the latter are not really
HTML-specific, and can thus be unsuitable for
HTML-minded parsing by TeX2page.
In TeXs without the kpathsea library,
TEX2PAGEINPUTS is the only way to get TeX2page to
automatically access files outside the working
directory. Note that TEX2PAGEINPUTS should be a
simple list of directory names, colon-separated in Unix
and semicolon-separated in Windows. It cannot use the
enhanced syntax (viz., * and //) that is
typically permitted for TEXINPUTS.
Error recovery in TeX2page is also exactly analogous to TeX, but we will postpone that discussion to p. 11.
Like most recent versions of TeX, TeX2page also
supports the standard self-identification
arguments ‑‑help and ‑‑version. These
arguments elicit help only if there isn’t an input file
(e.g., ‑‑help.tex) that could match them.
TeX2page called without an argument displays a help message and exits. Unlike TeX, TeX2page will not try to conjure up an input document based purely on console chitchat with an increasingly befuddled user.
In all these cases, the help displayed on the console
is also saved in the specially named log file
texput.hlog.
If, for any reason, it is not possible to call tex2page
from your operating-system command line, you may load the
file tex2page into your Lisp
and call the
procedure tex2page:tex2page with the name of the TeX file
as argument:
(load "tex2page") ;use appropriate pathname (tex2page:tex2page filename)
You can call the procedure
tex2page:tex2page several times from the same Lisp
session, on the same file or on different files.
Note that we’ve used a package-qualified name, as the Common
Lisp TeX2page is provided as a Common Lisp package tex2page
whose one exported symbol is tex2page. (But see Appendix A if
using the Scheme version of TeX2page.)
By default, TeX2page generates the output HTML files and other auxiliary files (p. 15) in the current working directory. You can tell TeX2page to place its output and auxiliary files in a different directory and thus avoid cluttering up your working directory.
The files used for specifying the target directory are:
jobname.hdir in the working directory,
.tex2page.hdir in the working directory, and
.tex2page.hdir in the user’s HOME directory.
The first line of the first of these files that exists
is taken to be the name of the target directory.
If none of the files exists, the current working
directory is the target directory.
For example, if story.hdir contains the filename
story as its first line, the HTML and aux files are
created in a subdirectory story of the
current directory.
The filename may contain the TeX control sequence
\jobname, which expands to the basename of
the TeX document. To always use an auxiliary
subdirectory with the same name as the basename of the
TeX document, have ~/.tex2page.hdir contain the
line “\jobname” (without quotes).
1 Hereafter, we will use “TeX” to mean any format of TeX, and “plain TeX” when we specifically mean the “plain” format. We will use “Lisp” to refer to the implementation language of the TeX2page script under discussion, although this can be either Common Lisp or Scheme, with near-identical behavior. For the minor differences, see Appendix A (p. 12).
2 The executable tex expects
its input file to be marked up in plain TeX. For a LaTeX document, the
executable to use is latex. Modern TeX engines such as
LuaTeX [35], XǝTeX [52], and pdfTeX have
executables named luatex, xetex, pdftex for the plain
format, and lualatex, xelatex, and pdflatex for LaTeX.
3 The modern TeXs LuaTeX, XǝTeX, and pdfTeX produce PDF rather than DVI. In the rest of this manual, whenever we refer to the output DVI file, the reader using the PDF versions of TeX should read PDF for DVI.
4 TeX2page, like TeX, will find the
file story.tex from your distribution as it is in your default TEXINPUTS.
If it’s too confusing operating on a file that you don’t see in
your immediate space, copy the file manually to your working
directory. You can find its location with kpsewhich story.
5 The file story.tex
lacks an \end only to demonstrate some interactive
capabilities of TeX, which are not relevant for
TeX2page.