HTML math options

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 01:56:05AM +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> LaTeX is not very practical to write program documentation.  Texinfo is
> not so good at math and bibliography.  However, when you need both, for
> instance when you write a manual for a program dealing with mathematics,
> I find Texinfo with tex4ht or latex2html and now mathjax to be better
> compromise than LaTeX as LaTeX is very poor for program documentation.
> The html obtained, for instance is much more suitable when going through
> Texinfo.

Does tex4ht ever produce acceptible output? I tried it with the
simple input

@math{a^2 + c + {b \over d}  + \sqrt{42}}

and it gives me the output

<p>   a2 + c + b 
d + &#x221A;
 _42
</p>

which is no good whatsoever.  Maybe it's just my setup or tex4ht
version?  I was going to add it to the documentation and enable it with
'-c HTML_MATH=t4h' or similar, but if it is always this bad there is
no point.

tex4ht appears to run TeX itself to get information from the produced dvi,
instead of (or as well as?) attempting to parse the TeX code.

latex2html works OK, except for ugly black bars on some equations, which
I resolved on my system with this advice:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/webpub/Eliminating_Black_Rules_Equation.html