Rebuilding LaTeX2HTML

LaTeX2HTML is the engine that actually creates the web pages. Countless authors have contributed to LaTeX2HTML. The originating author was Nikos Drakos, and in the later versions, Ross Moore took a leading coordinating role. Please see the online manual, http://www.eng.famu.fsu.edu/~dommelen/l2hman, or http://www.dommelen.net/l2hman, for a proper review of credits.

You might want to rebuild latex2html for some reason. For example, you might want to change the temp directory to where you have more space, or to a RAM disk to increase speed. Or change the names of executables. This web page explains how you can do that within the l2h shell.

Preparation: Make sure that install_l2h in the l2h folder has been run at the current location of l2h. If you have a second copy of the l2h folder somewhere else, move it out of the way to avoid confusion. There should not be any spaces in the location where the l2h folder is. (Try right-clicking the folder and selecting "Properties" to check. In any case, the rebuild below will check for spaces and refuse to run if there are any.)
In the l2h folder, double-click "terminal". (Or open your own terminal and cd to the l2h folder and source init.bat.)
In the terminal:
```
   cd system-files
   cd bin
   source rebuild_start.bat   (call rebuild_start.bat for Microsoft)
```
(If you have a .tcshrc file with special stuff in it, the sourcing might cause problems. If so, start a tcsh with the -f option and try again from within that.) Answer the questions, normally by simply hitting Enter. This should put you in the "l2hins" installation folder.
Have a look at prefs.pm using a text editor. It is in the l2hins folder, which is a subfolder of l2h. Do not make any changes unless you really have to. Then test the results thoroughly.
Next in the terminal do:
```
   ./configure   (or .\config.bat for MS Windows)
```
Check the screen for serious problems. Missing something like picttopnm is no big deal. You must have at least perl, ghostscript (gs or gswin32c), dvips, latexl2h.bat, pnmcat, pnmcrop, pnmfile, ppmquant.bat, and ppmtogif. The mktexlsr program may take its time. In the terminal, do make Check the screen for serious problems. If none,
```
   make check    (not in MS Windows)
```
Check the screen for serious problems. There may not be any errors in the perl code, or contact the author. If no problems,
```
   make test     (or .\test.bat for MS Windows)
```
Check the screen for serious problems. If none, check the results: with your web browser, go into the l2hins subfolder of l2h, then into test, l2htest, and open index.html. If there are no obvious problems, (there must be two equations in one of the latter web pages), in the terminal, do
```
   make install  (or .\install.bat for MS Windows)
```
Check the screen for serious problems.
Finally, in the terminal do
```
   cd ..
   cd system-files
   cd bin
   rebuild_end.bat
```
Answer the questions. If all went well, that should have rebuild latex2html from scratch. (In DOS, you might want to rerun install_l2h once more. This gets rid of the perl path. But any further install would do that anyway.)

Index

Examples