Using LaTeX to Create Quality PDF Documents for the World Wide Web

(01/27/11) A translation of this page to German is available from Alexandra Seremina. My hnmble thanks goes out to her.

The title of the article---rather long---pretty much tells it all. The initial draft of this paper was written for a colleague who didn't know much about LaTeX and I expanded and polished the article with that same point of view. Neither do I assume the reader knows much about Adobe Acrobat suite of software.

The primary emphasis is on how to create pdf documents that are creatures of the internet: interactive, colorful, pleasing to the eye. Most importantly, such documents must be able to be read on a computer screen (for long periods of time).

These stated goals are in contrast to simply putting a scientific paper on the web for others to download and print---LaTeX and pdf works very well for that application as well. See below for a discussion on how to prepare scientific papers for the web

The actual article, hyper.pdf can be viewed on-line or off-line. If you want to download off-line and read (probably recommended), you need to download the two files hyper.pdf and hytarg.pdf; the latter file is a dummy pdf file to jump to in some of the illustrations.

If you want to pursue this topic further, I've included these two files on the web site

The first one might be a start-up file for a sample document you might want to put together...modify it as you will. The second file, webplain.sty, is the page layout of the article. It is a good starting point for your own web style package. I messed around with the format of the table of contents to make it look more like the tables of content of my tutorials e-Calculus and Algebra Review in Ten Lessons.

New! The Web.sty package referenced above has recently been enhanced (5/1/99) to include many additional features: options for dvipsone, dvips, pdftex, navibar (a navigational menu bar), a choice of styles of for the table of contents, etc. There is a companion package called Exerquiz.sty which defines environments for creating on-line exercises, short multiple choice quizzes (with/without solutions) and longer multiple choice quizzes that are graded using JavaScript. Acrobat 3.0 and Forms 3.5 or above are required. The current version of the Acrobat Reader is 4.0. The two packages can be accessed at Web and Exerquiz Home page

I would be very much interested in hearing your reaction to this article. Also, should you have any corrections, or suggestions about how to improve the presentation, please contact me. I would be interested in communicating with you, maybe sharing knowledge and improving my techniques.

Proposal: It would be nice if this article could grow with the aid of the expertise of the LaTeX community. If you want to contribute a \section to this article, I would be happy to include it.

Another Related Link: Markus G. Kuhn has an html page with recommendations for anyone who wants to use TeX/LaTeX to put scientific papers on the Web: Effective Scientific Electronic Publishing

Estonian translation of this page at latex2pdf-estonian is due to Paula-Maria Niculescu

I truly hope these articles are of some value to you.

Regards,

dpstory@uakron.edu

Now I simply must get back to work!     

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