Customer Reviews

The LaTeX Web Companion: Integrating TeX, HTML, and XML

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book dates back to 1999, and since I'm writing this in 2006, that's seven years ago. Seven years is a long time for computer documentation. Virtually everything in the book is so far out of date that it's useless. The authors also didn't do a very good job of staying on topic; there are many long digressions that are neither interesting nor useful. In many cases, the authors merely give a broad-strokes outline of how to accomplish a particular task, or talk about several different approaches that have been taken by different people, without concluding with anything very helpful about how to actually accomplish the task.

I have found this book almost as useful and interesting as the LaTeX Companion. I think that it gives enough information about sharing TeX and LaTeX texts on the web, but the chapters covering pdfTeX and SGML/XML applications could be more detailed.
I have found that there is another big problem - with every day coming the information tends to get older and older. I can fully recommend buying this book today, but I am not sure if I would do it once more after half a year has passed.

If you were interested in transforming TeX into PDF, I would recommend also the LaTeX Graphics Companion, or some other book introducing the problematic of PostScript and PDF.

I am an user of latex on linux for sometime now. The possibillities are uncountable with this excellent software. This book touches on the use of tex and latex for the web. Being not that experienced with all the possibillities this book is very usefull. It is a good introduction for converting latex and tex files to documents for the web. If you can grasp all the stuff in this book you will be able to easily prepare all kinds of documents for the web and in the end save a lot of time lost with programming html yourself.
Don't expect to much examples and user details, it has an excellent index and reference list to get you started.
There is a lot of math stuff in this book, so trying to get a lot of formula's on the web this will certainly be of help. I am not into math so a couple pages could be skipped.
Concluding: want to get started with latex and the web, want to make good documents for the web on a fast and good way, this is the book for you.

I'd put this on my amazon wishlist since I saw it listed used for ~$2. Unfortunately, somebody spent the money to buy it for me new. As mentioned by another reviewer, this book is dated, and much of it stale and not worth reading. This is especially true if your interest is mathematics presentation content.

You'll find gross detail on:
- latex2html, a processor system that produces output that looks awful
- mathml from latex, a system that has little good browser support, and only primitive mathematics tooling.
- a big chapter on xml, something that has little interest to somebody producing document content.
- ...

Parts of the pdf chapter I found worthwhile, but a printed copy of that text doesn't justify the dead trees. Perhaps I'll hack that bit out of the book with a knife and recycle the rest.