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htmlpp Version 4.2a

htmlpp - The HTML Preprocessor

• Overview
• Installing Htmlpp
  • Getting Htmlpp
  • Installation Under Unix
  • Installation Under MS-DOS
  • Installation Under 32-bit Windows
• Getting Started
• Htmlpp Reference
  • Description
  • Command-line Syntax
  • Inserting Symbols
  • Types of Symbol
  • Standard Symbols
  • Htmlpp Commands
  • Htmlpp Macro Processing
  • Multilingual support
    • Support For Accented Characters
    • Dates Formatting
    • Multilingual Variables
    • Generating Several Language Versions from a Single Source File
  • Htmlpp Guru Mode
    • Standard Guru Mode Definitions
    • Chapter and Section Headers
    • Table of Contents
    • Pagination
    • Page Headers and Footers
    • Paragraphs
    • Preformatted Text
    • Bulleted and Numbered Lists
    • Definition Lists
    • Tables
    • Figures and Images
    • Hyperlinks
    • Special Characters
  • Htmlpp Intrinsic Functions
    • The &date Function
    • The &time Function
    • The &week_day Function
    • The &year_week Function
    • The &julian_date Function
    • The &lillian_date Function
    • The &date_to_days Function
    • The &days_to_date Function
    • The &future_date Function
    • The &past_date Function
    • The &date_diff Function
    • The &image_width Function
    • The &image_height Function
    • The &file_size Function
    • The &file_date Function
    • The &file_time Function
    • The &normalise Function
    • The &system Function
    • The &upper Function
    • The &lower Function
    • The &pageref Function
    • The &relpath Function
  • Multipass Processing
  • Multipass Debugging
  • Other Things to Know
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • Why does my .if command not work?
  • Why does my .if command still not work?
  • How do I install htmlpp on UNIX?
  • How do I change the .htm extension to .html?
  • Do you know of any good link checkers?
• Other Information
  • Product History

Overview

An article in the December 1997 issue of Linux Journal describes htmlpp, and is a good introduction to this tool.

What is htmlpp?

• Htmlpp is a pre-processor for HTML documents.
• Its purpose is to simplify the work of writing and packaging large numbers of HTML documents.
• It acts like a compiler: you provide an input source text and htmlpp produces the HTML documents from that. This is easier and safer than trying to edit and manage separate HTML documents.
• To use htmlpp, you should be comfortable writing HTML without help from a special HTML editor. This is not usually a problem, since HTML is a simple language.
• Htmlpp is free software written in Perl, and copyright (c) 1996-97 iMatix. It is distributed with full sources according to the GNU General Public License.

What does htmlpp do?

• It breaks one input source text file into several HTML documents. Typically you will want to edit a larger file (it is faster and easier), but provide the information in smaller pieces on-line (people can access it easier). Htmlpp makes this possible.
• It lets you define symbols like version in one place, then use these in the text like this: $(version) so that you can make changes in a single place only, not throughout the text.
• It creates tables of contents, and links to chain pages together in sequence.
• It adds headers and footers to pages, so that you can keep a consistent style in all HTML pages.
• It lets you define macros to simplify HTML markup.
• It converts plain text into HTML using guru mode.
• It converts accented characters into HTML metacharacters.
• It allows you to embed Perl code and to include the output of any external program into the page.
• It queries flat-text databases.
• It provides features to build multilingual sites.
• It provides many built-in functions to simplify HTML writing, like calculating image dimensions, file sizes, working with dates, etc.

How do I use htmlpp?

• Take a look at htmlpp.txt, which is the documentation source for htmlpp's own on-line documentation. This is the main example for htmlpp.
• The files in template.zip provide the basic template for a new project. This zip file is provided as part of the htmlpp package.
• Edit the source text using any text editor, then run htmlpp on the source. It produces a number of HTML files (extension .htm) which you can test using a browser.
• In general, htmlpp generates HTML pages that use relative addressing, so that pages refer to each other without specifying a host or path. This allows you to test and use the HTML pages on a local hard disk.

Where do I get htmlpp?

• Htmlpp is available from the iMatix website as a zip file for Windows or DOS or OS/2 and as a tgz file for UNIX. Both contain the same files.

What else should I know?

• Htmlpp uses Perl 4 or Perl 5. It does not use any system-specific features, so will run on any box (I wrote it mostly under MS-DOS; it's been used on heavily on UNIX and OS/2).
• Perl is a programming language written by Larry Wall that is freely available for many platforms. If you never installed or used Perl, this is an excellent time to start.
• Under MS-DOS, you will need Big Perl to process large documents.

What Are The Alternatives?

• A lot of work by hand.
• A number of other products work somewhat like htmlpp. Take a look at the eponymously named htmlpp at http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/nthiery.

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