The basic idea of Hyperlatex is to make it possible to write a document that will look like a flawless LaTeX document when printed and like a handwritten HTML document when viewed with an HTML browser. In this it completely follows the philosophy of latexinfo (and texinfo). Like latexinfo, it defines its own input format—the Hyperlatex markup language—and provides two converters to turn a document written in Hyperlatex markup into a DVI file or a set of HTML documents.

Obviously, this approach has the disadvantage that you have to learn a "new" language to generate HTML files. However, the mental effort for this is quite limited. The Hyperlatex markup language is simply a well-defined subset of LaTeX that has been extended with commands to create hyperlinks, to control the conversion to HTML, and to add concepts of HTML such as horizontal rules and embedded images. Furthermore, you can use Hyperlatex perfectly well without knowing anything about HTML markup.

The fact that Hyperlatex defines only a restricted subset of LaTeX does not mean that you have to restrict yourself in what you can do in the printed copy. Hyperlatex provides many commands that allow you to include arbitrary LaTeX commands (including commands from any package that you'd like to use) which will be processed to create your printed output, but which will be ignored in the HTML document.

If you would rather have a tool that takes any Latex-file and translates it into HTML, you are probably happier with the Latex2html converter.

Otfried Cheong, February 25, 2002