Plain TeX and TeX4ht

If you try to generate html version of your plain TeX document using a combination of pdfTeX and TeX4ht, you will find terrible mismatches and html version will not be generated. The reason for the problem is TeX4ht needs a dvi output from which it extracts the html while pdfTeX generates a pdf by default. Therefore, TeX4ht post-processor will cry that there is no jobname.dvi. However,

 ht 'pdftex -output-format=dvi' bk7.tex

will work. But the html file will have only the ASCII characters of your document and will not be valid html. To make a valid html from a plain TeX file, you have to do the following trick.

You need to wrap up your TeX source file with following code:

 \input amstex  
 \documentstyle{amsppt}
 \csname tex4ht\endcsname
 \document

 . . . source of your plain TeX document . . .

 \enddocument

The following command might be handy to generate file.html assuming your input file name is file.tex:

 httex file "xhtml,html4.4ht,unicode.4ht,mathml.4ht"

Plain TeX users might miss this trick when they happen to use TeX4ht which is supposed to work out of box in the case of LaTeX documents.

Author: cvr

A TeX programmer and free software activist living in Trivandrum.

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