Another section

Message-ID:  <m0xIrvr-000OWIC@dcarlisle.demon.co.uk>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
In-Reply-To:  <199710080039.UAA01177@fenris.math.albany.edu> (message from Mark
              Steinberger on Tue, 7 Oct 1997 20:39:48 -0400)
Date:         Wed, 8 Oct 1997 09:57:27 +0100
From: David Carlisle <david@DCARLISLE.DEMON.CO.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      Re: LaTeX journal and publisher macros
Status: R

> Many journals these days work from author-created tex files, and a
> substantial portion of the authoring community uses amstex.

I don't know of any converter myself, but do you have any idea why
they still use amstex. In particular if you (or someone else) put the
work in to make a converter and then openly advertised submission
requirements as

`Submit articles in latex or amstex, in the latter case we will convert
your document to latex in house before processing it.'

Then at least some of those authors may think it worth the trouble to
code it up in latex to start with. If they all did that then the
effort to write the translater is wasted (or at least did not work in
the way intended:-).

Also in what way do you want to treat the latex. Do you really want
some `external' translator to produce a file marked up with LaTeX
(+amsmath package) markup, so you can use it as input to some
`LaTeX-like' engines such as latex2html or ScientificWord, or do you
`just' want something that will allow documents (or sections of
documents) marked up in amstex to be processed directly by LaTeX.

To give a couple of example I know more about, on ctan you will find a
couple of the latter type of `converters', namely plain.sty and
typehtml.sty which allow `plain TeX' and `HTML' markup to be directly
processed by LaTeX.

so you can go

     \documentclass{article}

     \usepackage{plain,typehtml}

     \begin{document}

     \begin{plain}
     \beginsection This is a section

     Marked up in {\it plain \TeX}.
     \end{plain}

     \dohtml
     <html>
     <h1>Another section</h1>
     <p>
     Marked up in <em>HTML</em>.
     </p>
     </html>

     \end{document}

and LaTeX will do something more or less sensible with it, but I hate
to think what latex2html would make of the above.

So what kind of converter are you looking for?

David