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Friday, May 19, 2006

ETSET Version 3.2 Posted

Version 3.2 of ETSET, which translates electronic texts written in human readable form into LaTeX (and thence to PostScript and PDF, if you wish), HTML (either single document or individual chapters with navigation links), or Palm Markup Language (PML) to produce eReader books which can be read on a variety of handheld platforms, is now available.

Version 3.2 extends support for XHTML generation, including a new “--strict” option which generates XHTML 1.0 (Strict DTD) with all presentation specified using CSS 2.1. JavaScript is used to work around the banishment of the “target=” attribute from “<a>” tags in the interest of purity of body, soul, and spirit, but this only affects multiple file HTML output for documents with footnotes and, should JavaScript be unavailable or disabled, the only consequence will be footnotes opening in the same window as the document containing them, with recourse to the “Back” button permitting return to the original passage. The “--unicode” option may be specified to generate XHTML Unicode text entities for special characters such as opening and closing quotation marks, ellipses, and dashes.

As a test and demonstration of the new version of ETSET, I have re-generated the on-line HTML edition of Tom Swift in the City of Gold in Strict mode (which you're welcome to verify for yourself) with Unicode special characters. As time permits, I will similarly upgrade HTML editions of other electronic texts on the site.

ETSET is a C++/STL program written using the Literate Programming methodology in the CWEB System; the source code and complete documentation (both user-level and internal) may be read online (PDF file).

Posted at May 19, 2006 20:59