LaTeXML*knowledge

Summary: Contributing to the LaTeXML software to add support for the knowledge package.

What’s knowledge?

Knowledge is a LaTeX package that makes it easy to introduce internal hyperlinks into your documents. This is particularly useful for technical documents (for instance research articles in theoretical computer science) where you might use a lot of terminology and notation. By using this package, you can easily produce a PDF in which every technical term or symbol is clickable and links directly to its definition. Behind the scenes, your LaTeX document looks very similar to what you would usually write, except that you mark the terms you want to make clickable using quotation marks.

What’s the problem?

Currently, editors are trying to move away from the PDF format—which was built to deal with printed documents—to HTML. One advantage of HTML is that it is much more accessible: this is why arXiv and Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (LZI) are initiating this transition. However, the scientific community still heavily relies on LaTeX to write its articles: making it possible to compile TeX documents into HTML is therefore an important goal.

LaTeXML to the rescue

In 2004, Bruce Miller started working on a TeX-to-HTML compiler designed to address this need. The software remains under active development, and many packages are not yet supported, including knowledge. My goal for the upcoming weeks will be to port the knowledge package to LaTeXML.