From LaTeX to (good looking) JavaHelp

Originally, JHelpDev was developed to convert HTML files generated with latex2html to a JavaHelp set.

General Steps

  1. do screenshots if necessary, convert them to EPS
  2. write LaTeX code, article class recommended
  3. avoid using scale and angle in graphics environment or remove it before invoking latex2html
  4. convert latex sources to HTML with latex2html
  5. create a JHelpDev project directory and copy the directory with the HTML files to it, it is recommended to use a subdirectory within the project directory with a descriptive name for the helpset to create unique targets, like nonparam.node1 instead of just node1, this can be useful if different helpsets generated from latex2html should be merged at a later stage and if context-sensitive help is used, help IDs must be unique across all helpsets in this case
  6. create the helpset with JHelpDev, integrate it with JHelpAction and package it with the JAR archive of your Java application

Graphics, Screenshots

Graphics must be available as EPS files to use them with LaTeX. Here is a converter script:

         #!/bin/bash

          for  i in `ls *.gif`; 
          do
          echo converting $i;
          giftopnm $i > ${i%.gif}.pnm;
          pnmtops  ${i%.gif}.pnm >  ${i%.gif}.eps;
          rm  ${i%.gif}.pnm;
          done

Commandline options


Here is a reasonable Latex2html invokation: 
         #!/bin/bash

          latex2html  -split 4 -link 1 -white -antialias  -image_type "gif" -local_icons -transparent -noaddress -noinfo $1

Especially the split option is useful because it creates a new file for each LaTeX section. Put content that should appear in a single HTML file into a section without nesting content too much into subsections. Otherwise, if a section has many subsections, subsubsections, etc. this would produce very large HTML files which are not nice in a JavaHelp viewer.