1.  Introduction

The web has made it possible for instructors to make their course notes readily accessible to their students. Beyond lecture content, web based notes might include applets, links to related material, and make it easy to send comments to the instructor and possibly to classmates. But, in order to publish on the web, the instructor must create HTML files that include the appropriate anchors. The instructor may already have prepared her/his course notes possibly electonically using a text fomatter like troff. It would be useful to be able to create searchable HTML pages, including any necessary additional tags from these same troff input files. This would enable the instructor to make changes in both the printed and web-based versions at the same time, while being still able to create publication quality documents.

This article describes a toolkit, roffToWeb, that creates both a PostScript document and an HTML version from a single set of troff source files. The conversion process and the advantages of this approach are illustrated. The technology used to create roffToWeb is extensible to any text formatter, e.g. LaTeX [LaTeX].

There are other tools that have been developed to create HTML pages from text formatter input files. However, they are more restricted than roffToWeb in that

1.

User defined macros are not allowed. See [troff2html].

2.

Most of these tools are shell scripts or are written in perl, and are not rule based, i.e., the tool's source code must be modified for a new preprocessor to be utilized.

3.

Such tools do not provide a navigation system, or make sure that every page has an identical look and feel. See [LaTex2Html].

4.

They do not support creating both HTML and PostScript files, but rather focused on producing HTML code.

5.

They are not as easy to use as roffToWeb.

Last modified: 24/November/98 (09:40)