Producing HTML Documents with Scribe

2. Making Scribe produce HTML

In the simplest case, you have a short Scribe document that you want to use to produce a single HTML file. Two things need to be done:

1. Specify @device(HTML) at the beginning of your document, or use the appropriate command-line switch.
2. If your document uses @description, you must post-process the .html output file with the awk script html-post.awk[See Section 11.]. This adds the HTML <DD> tags inside the description body. If you omit this step, your @description environments will be incorrectly formatted.

Not all Scribe environments can be successfully translated into HTML. The following limitations exist:

• @display, @example, @fileexample, @programexample, @format are all formatted using the HTML <PRE> tag (preformatted text). This is usually displayed in a typewriter font.
• HTML doesn't support centered text. @center just puts the text on a line by itself.
• Footnotes are placed in-line, enclosed in [square brackets].
• Tabbing and other format control commands don't have analogs in HTML, so these commands will have no effect, except in unfilled environments, which are formatted with <PRE>.
• The @* command has no effect for the HTML device, except in unfilled environments. As an alternative, the HTML library (Section 3) defines the @br command, which causes a line break for all device types. You should use @br in place of @*.
• With the common availability of laser printers, many document types, and some Scribe users, specify the size environment attribute. Since HTML doesn't directly support arbitrary character sizes, specification of size will result in the error message:

     Output device html cannot achieve scaling.
      

  This is not harmful and may be ignored.

The HTML device type provides the basic formatting into HTML. The features described in the remaining sections are only available by including the library file HTML.