Developments: late 1997 to early 1998

Much of the work contributed to L^ATEX2HTML during this time was related to bug fixing and maintaining the 97.1 release, in order to reach a more stable and reliable version which produces HTML code conforming to the W3C standards/drafts. To keep in context with this view, support for HTML 4 has been incorporated into the translator.

There have been improvements to the way math code is handled, as well as font-changing and numbering commands. These now are expected to work much closer to the way that L^ATEX handles them.

Furthermore, missing L^ATEX style translations for basic L^ATEX and A_MS-TEX document classes were added to the distribution: book.perl, report.perl, article.perl, letter.perl, amsbook.perl and amsart.perl. New styles implementing L^ATEX packages include seminar.perl, inputenc.perl and chemsym.perl naming but a few.

The aim is ultimately to support all L^ATEX, A_MS-TEX etc. packages in the standard L^ATEX distribution, or for which there is published documentation. At the time of writing this aim has not quite been reached. To support internationalisation, Perl extensions were provided for HTML output conforming to ISO-Latin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and Unicode encodings.

All of the above work was done by Ross Moore.

Additional document formats are now supported, these are IndicTEX, FoilTeX, and CWEB documents. You may use any of these packages to translate such documents together with L^ATEX2HTML, refer to the instructions in the various README files.

Thanks go to Ross Moore for IndicTEX/HTML, to Boris Veytsman for FoilTeX/HTML and to Jens Lippmann for the CWEB to HTML translator.

Numerous discussions and efforts have been undertaken to get L^ATEX2HTML working independent from the underlying operating system. Yet all obstacles are not quite taken, but it is forseeable that we are OS independent very soon. This release has been reported to run on OS/2, DOS, and MacOS, besides Unix-like operating systems. A former version has also been ported to Amiga OS, but that results still need to be re-integrated into the source. Ports for Windows'95 and Windows NT exist, but are not yet integrated with the main distribution.

Thanks go to Marcus Hennecke, Axel Ramge, Marek Rouchal and Uli Wortmann for fruitful and refreshening discussions about that Override.pm loading scheme (which finally made its way after enough chickens and eggs chased one another to death $\smiley\,$), and to Daniel Taupin for his successful efforts to get L^ATEX2HTML running on DOS.

Thanks go also to Fabrice Popineau for his port to Windows NT ³, and Nikos Drakos for a Windows 95 port based on V96.1h ⁴(which is mentioned here at last, but not least).

We want to take the opportunity to thank Scott Nelson and the people at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who help to keep up the L^ATEX2HTML main archive and the mailing list, and to Achim Bohnet at the Max Planck Institut fuer extraterrestrische Physik, Garching for maintaining the list's online archive. Finally thanks and greetings to all people that contributed to this release and have not been mentioned here...

You all showed spirit and favour. Thank you for your efforts!

... and don't forget Jens and the LiPS team at Darmstadt!