How to convert Latex to HTML?

In this blog post, I will explain a simple way of transforming a Latex document to HTML. Why doing this? There are many reasons. For example, you may have formatted some text in Latex and would like to quickly integrate it in a webpage.

The wrong way

First, there is a wrong way of doing this. It is to first create a PDF from your Latex document, and then use a tool to convert from PDF to HTML. If you try this and the document is even just slightly complex, the result may be very bad… and the HTML code may be horrible with many unecessary tags.

The good way

Thus, the best way to convert Latex to HTML is to use some dedicated tool. There are several free tools, but many are designed to run on Linux. If you are using Windows, it may thus take you some time to find the right tool.

Luckily the popular Latex distributions like MikTek and TexLive include an executable of a softwate to convert from Latex to HTML that works on Windows. Thus, if you have the full TexLive distribution, you do not need to download or install anything else. Below, I will describe how to do with TexLive on Windows.

Using TexLive on Windows

First, you need to open the command line and go to the directory containing your Latex document. Let say that your Latex document is called article.tex. Then, you can run this command:

   htlatex article.tex

The result will be a new file article.html

The result is usually quite good. For example, I have converted a research paper that I wrote about high utility episode mining and the results looks like this:

I would say that 90 % of the paper was converted correctly. There are some other parts that I have not shown like some pseudocode for some algorithms that were not formatted properly. But I would say that the conversion is on overall really good.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I have shown a simple way of converting Latex to HTML on Windows using the TexLive distribution. If you are using MikTex or Linux, similar commands can be used.

—
Philippe Fournier-Viger is a computer science professor and founder of the SPMF open-source data mining library, which offers more than 170 algorithms for analyzing data, implemented in Java.