Chapter 1. Introduction
For many, LaTeX is the prefered format for document authoring, particularly those involving significant mathematical content and where quality typesetting is desired. On the other hand, content-oriented XML is an extremely useful representation for documents, allowing them to be used, and reused, for a variety of purposes, not least, presentation on the Web. Yet, the style and intent of LaTeX markup, as compared to XML markup, not to mention its programmability, presents difficulties in converting documents from the former format to the latter. Perhaps ironically, these difficulties can be particularly large for mathematical material, where there is a tendency for the markup to focus on appearance rather than meaning.
The choice of LaTeX for authoring, and XML for delivery were natural and uncontroversial choices for the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. Faced with the need to perform this conversion and the lack of suitable tools to perform it, the DLMF project proceeded to develop thier own tool, LaTeXML, for this purpose. This document describes a preview release of LaTeXML.
¶ Design Goals
The idealistic goals of LaTeXML are:
As these goals are not entirely practical, or even somewhat contradictory, they are implicitly modified by ``as much as possible.'' Completely mimicing TeX's behaviour would seem to require the sneakiest modifications to TeX, itself. `Ease of use' is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. More significantly, few documents are likely to have completely unambiguous mathematics markup; human understanding of both the topic and the surrounding text is needed to properly interpret any particular fragment. Thus, rather than pretend to provide a `turn-key' solution, we expect that document-specific declarations or tuning to be necessary to faithfully convert documents. Towards this end, we provide a variety of means to customize the processing and declare the author's intent. At the same time, especially for new documents, we encourage a more logical, content-oriented markup style, over a purely presentation-oriented style.
¶ Overview of this Manual
Chapter 2 describes the usage of LaTeXML, along with common use cases and techniques. Chapter 3 describes the system architecture in some detail. Strategies for customization and implementation of new packages is described in Chapter 4. The special considerations for mathematics, including details of representation and how to improve the conversion, are covered in Chapter 5. An overview of outstanding issues and planned future improvements are given in Chapter 6. Finally, the Appendices A, B give detailed documentation on the commands and modules comprising the system.
If all else fails, you can consult the source code, or the author.