LE3 .A278 2004

2004

Diamond, Jim

Acadia University

Bachelor of Computer Science

Honours

Computer Science

Computer Science

TEX is a powerful typesetting system, developed by Donald E. Knuth in the early 1980s, which allows a user who knows little about typesetting mathematics to do so easily and correctly. TEX is also freely distributed. Because of these features, it has become popular amongst mathematicians, computer scientists, and other researchers. Since TEX’s inception, it has been used to typeset countless theses, research papers, textbooks, and other documents. In fact, this document was formatted using TEX. Since the advent of the World Wide Web, several attempts have been made to de- velop facilities to translate TEX documents into Web-friendly formats such as HTML and PDF. However, each of the currently available facilities has shortcomings. Be- cause of these shortcomings, none of the available facilities are satisfactory solutions. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a satisfactory TEX-to-HTML translator. The thesis discusses the prominent features of TEX and the difficulties in implementing a TEX-to-HTML translator, and reviews existing solutions to the problem, as well as their benefits and shortcomings. The potential approaches to the problem are listed and discussed, as are the reasons for the chosen approach. The software package RCTEX (pronounced “arctic”), the author’s implementation of a TEX-to-HTML translator, is discussed in detail. Finally some sample results are provided and compared to results of the original TEX program and the results of existing solutions.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:434