Re: [Tads3] Eric Eve's Getting Started guide

["Eric Eve" <eric.eve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Søren J. Løvborg wrote:

>> after playing around with Page Plus a bit, I manage to produce
>> the HTML which I've just put up at
>> http://users.ox.ac.uk/~manc0049/TADSGuide/index.html

> I don't remember ever seeing such horrible HTML code before.
But hey, since the result looks very nice in the browser, who
> cares about the HTML? :)

I didn't look at the underlying HTML, but that doesn't surprise me: Page
Plus is basically a DTP package and it's probably doing all sorts of nasty
HTML tricks to try to ensure that what you see in a browser is as close as
possible to what to lay out on the screen. I suspect that the only way to
get decent HTML would be to save the Guide as a plain text file, import the
plain text into an HTML editor, and then reformat it for display, but I have
absolutely no intention of doing that (although if anyone else is keen to do
so I'd be happy to send them the text!).

> Here's what I'd do:

> Create a style.css file, and copy and paste everything between the
> <style> and </style> tags (any of the HTML documents will do,) into the
> css-file.
> Then do a find/replace, replacing all instances of 'font-size:'
> with 'xyzzy:' (or whatever) to allow the reader to adjust font-sizes.
> And then fix the lack of indentation in code-fragments by adding this
line:
> white-space: pre
> between the braces in the CSS-block called #CodePara-C.

> Finally, in all the HTML-files, replace the <style></style> block
> with <LINK type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">.

> That ought to do it. And whenever you export an updated HTML version,
> you'd only have to repeat the final step.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I think I'll stick to simply maintaining the
PDF version unless there's evidence of really strong demand for it in HTML
as well. If it turns out there is, I may revisit your suggestion, but I'd
also look at other tools for producing the HTML (using Page Plus to do it
was just an experiment, after all).

-- Eric