Sunday, April 29, 2012

Slackware - TeX4ht, Sigil

Using the new Google blog interface for the first time here. Appears it's critical to set the line breaks in "Options", or else bloggers will have to enter <br> at the end of each and every return, even inside code listings and block quotes.

Links: Sigil source Sigil is QT; TeX4ht source No specific dependencies - compiles .tex files; Instructions for making TeX4ht .epubs

Epubs in general

I have files in .tex format. These are easily transformed into PDF's or other formats in LaTeX, but what about reflowable formats? That is, what if one wishes to read files on a celly, Cobo, Nook, Kindle, etc? Two possibilities jumped out. Sigil appeared to be a good Linux WYSIWYG option for taking text files and making them into reflowable .epub files. But of equal importance, TeX4ht appears to do the job on .tex files. We'll start with it.

TeX4ht (LaTex)

The TeX4ht source is here. This appears to require the latest LaTeX installation to work.

Sigil (QT)

The Sigil source is available here, in .zip format. Download and unpack into a directory.

Installation - prep

README indicates it's a QT program. Dependencies (besides QT basics) are libqt4-xml, libqt4-svg, libqt4-webkit and libqt4-dev. Some of these also have dependencies. For a list of what libs I already had onboard, I checked with...
$ ldconfig -p |grep libqt
libqt-mt.so.3 (libc6) => /usr/lib/qt/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
libqt-mt.so (libc6) => /usr/lib/qt/lib/libqt-mt.so
...which indicated I had insufficient QT libs for Sigil.

The installer uses the annoying cmake instead of make:
$ configure prefix=/usr
$ make
# make install