Notes on installation and configuration of latex2html with MiKTeX

"Installing LATEX2HTML with MiKTEX" and "Tools for Publishing LaTeX Documents on the Web" are two good reference for dealing with latex2html. The following are a list of notes I wrote down when installing and configuring latex2html with MiKTeX.

1. It is important to install MiKTeX, Ghostscript, and latex2html in a path with no space in between, the default place under "Program Files" will introduce problems.


2. If you install NetPbm for Windows using the Binaries release, do not forget to drag the Dependencies as well. So you will not get error messages about missing dll's.


3. Change the location where Ghostscript, NetPbm, and latex2html are installed in prefs.pm. The line numbers are not exact the same as in Installing LATEX2HTML with MiKTEX due to versioning.


4. Change the $TMP in l2hconf.pm to a path with no space in between as well.


5. While most configurations are done by updating l2hconf.pm in Installing LATEX2HTML with MiKTEX, I suggest use $INIT_FILE_NAME to do the customizations that you like. You need to change $INIT_FILE_NAME to a file name that Windows system can recognize like 'dot.latex2html-init'. The default '.latex2html-init' is not accepted by Windows.


6. Jos has a latex2html-init file that fixed several bugs in the original one coming with latex2html distribution. I found it is very helpful. I reused all the perl functions in that file, but did not use his style part.


7. In order to get white background of the images, I set
   

   
   @IMAGE_TYPES = qw(png gif);
   $IMAGE_TYPE  = $IMAGE_TYPES[0];
   

   
   which means use png format.
   And in the latex2html-init file, I set
   

   
   $TRANSPARENT_FIGURES = 0; # default = 1
   $LOAD_LATEX_COLOR = "\\usepackage[dvips]{color}";
   $LATEX_COLOR = "\\pagecolor[gray]{1}"; # 1 means white and 0 means black
   

   
   


8. In order to change the personal information in the $ADDRESS and "About this document", I set
   

   
   $DONGHOME = "http://homepage.usask.ca/~dol142";
   $DONG = "<A href=\"$DONGHOME\"> Dong Liu</A>";
   $address_data[0] = $DONG; # My real name
   $ADDRESS = "Copyright &#169; <I>$address_data[1]</I>  <I>$DONG</I>"; # rewrite $ADDRESS
   

   
   

Grammar check of documents generated by LaTeX

LaTeX is good for formatting academic papers and thesis with provided style files. Spelling check of LaTeX documents is never an issue by using a tool like Aspell or with the support of your text editor. However, grammar check still looks like an impossible task. For Windows users, this may be the most strong excuse to say Word is still better for everyday writing. Yes ... and why not use Word to do that task for LaTex documents? Word does not interpret LaTex, but how about RTF or HTML?

I have tried several applications converting pdf files to RTF including Acrobat professional. The generated files are messy. So I tried tools generating HTML. The one that I am using now is latex2html. Open the generated HTML files and let Word to spelling and grammar check them (F7), and then you can modify the tex file correspondingly.

Search blogs subscribed in Google Reader

Basically, there are two ways to searching all the blogs in your Google Reader. One is to use Google custom search engine, and the other is to use Google gear and Greasemonkey script.

The details about the latter option is described in Raúl's blog. The offline function of Google Reader works for me, but the Greasemonkey search script halts everytime I try to start the offline search. I cannot figure out what is the problem.

What I currently use is the first option: create a custom search engine that has all the links of subscribed blogs in its site list. The details is described on Google Operating System blog. The search function really helps when you want to testity some 'Déjà vu' of your reading.

MS's new desktop

Just checked the advertisement of MS surface. Its cool. That's what a group of HCI folks are investigating on. Will it become the future standard equipment in luxury hotels, stores, or office?

HPCS2007 poster: Towards an HTTP-based Service Platform with High Scalability

This year, HPCS comes to Saskatoon, and I submitted a poster titled "Towards an HTTP-based Service Platform with High Scalability". The abstract is the following.

HTTP is a message transportation method used by the majority of so-called web services or services on the web, which are implemented by using SOAP or POX/JSON. The application of Ajax has dramatically increased the load on service platforms by long-lived connection and frequent polling. For most multithreading platforms implementing thread-per-request policy, this raises scalability problems for threads since the performance of each thread will be degraded when the total number of threads increases. Service orchestrations can also introduce thread scalability problems when they have long lifetime and involve message exchanges with multiple high-latency partner services.

This poster discusses the issues for an HTTP-based service platform to achieve high scalability. We compare the options for platform implementation of IO, thread pool, asynchrony, and continuation, and propose a design for highly scalable platform for both atomic services and service orchestrations.

Interesting panel records from TSSJS2007

TheServerSide has posted records of three interesting panel in TSSJS2007. They are worth watching.
SOA Technology Panel - TSSJS 2007
The Next Application Platform - TSSJS 2007
High Performance Computing Panel - TSSJS 2007

The keywords that are talked are SOA, EDA, EAI, high performance infrastructure, ESB, Ajax, mashup, management, and scalability(scale out).

Reload a page in Firefox

A weird problem happened to Firefox of my desktop today. Some Wikipedia pages could NOT be correctly loaded because of CSS problem. 'Reload the current page' just did not work, similar as F5. Restarting Firefox did not help either. Then I figured out that I need to reload and override the cache. That is Ctrl+F5. It is better to learn all the shortcuts and find more tricks.