This document describes the Perl script html2ps – an HTML to PostScript converter. The program is developed on a Unix system (Sun Solaris), but have also been reported working on other platforms, such as Windows, MS-DOS, VAX/VMS and MacIntosh.
First, do not get intimidated by the size of this document. At least on a Unix system with Perl installed, you should be able to convert a local text-only HTML file directly without doing any preparation at all. Just execute the script with the HTML file as parameter and direct the output to a file or a printer, for example:
html2ps file.html > file.ps
or perhaps
perl html2ps file.html > file.ps
There are several possibilities to control the appearance of the
output. Starting with version 1.0 of html2ps, most of this is done
via configuration files, and not with command line options only.
A sample configuration file 'sample' is included with the html2ps
distribution (used by the installation script to convert this
document to postscript). You can take a look at this file to see
an example of a configuration file.
The command line options, and how to set their defaults using
a configuration file, are described in the
option block below.
Jean-Philippe Argaud has written a GUI (xhtml2ps) for html2ps. You can find this in the directory 'contrib'. Both html2ps and xhtml2ps comes with the GNU General Public License, see the file 'COPYING' for details.
There are two mailing lists for html2ps:
For certain tasks, such as rendering of inline images and retrieving remote documents, html2ps depends on other program packages. First of all, you should make sure that you have all the necessary software installed on your system. See below where these packages can be found.
Since html2ps is written in Perl, you must of course have Perl installed, version 5 or later is required.
If you want to make use of the support for inline images, you must have one of the packages ImageMagick, pbmplus or netpbm installed. If you do not have ImageMagick (or if it is not installed with jpeg support), you can use djpeg from the jpegsrc distribution to handle jpeg images. The recommended image package is ImageMagick together with its Perl module interface PerlMagick.
To be able to convert remote documents directly without downloading them first, you must have have some program installed for this purpose. The best is to either use the Perl module library libwww-perl or www.pl and network.pl, but you can for example also use lynx or url_get for this.
Ghostscript is also required to get full functionality (needed to generate DSC PostScript and cross references).
If you are on a Unix or Windows system, and have all necessary software installed, you can now execute the installation script 'install' to build a global configuration file, and install all files. On other platforms you will have to create a global configuration file manually, and insert its name into the html2ps script. This is described in next section.
Configuration files are used for layout control, resource information etc. Normally, there should always exist a global configuration file. In this file one typically specify things like: what image conversion packages are available on the system, the default paper size, the default text fonts and sizes, etc.
For Unix and Windows systems, the installation script 'install' can be used to automatically build a global configuration file with all necessary definitions, and install all files. The files replaced by the installation are saved. If you for some reason are not satisfied with the new version: execute the script 'backout' to reinstall your earlier version.
On other systems, you will have to manually create a global
configuration file, and insert the name of this file into the
html2ps script (close to the beginning, the line starting with
"$globrc="). The configuration file should contain a
package block, and perhaps
paper and
hyphenation blocks, described below.
Each user can then have a personal configuration file (by default $HOME/.html2psrc) that complements/overrides the definitions made in the global file. It is also possible to specify alternative files on the command line, using the -f option.
A configuration file can include other configuration files. This is done with:
@import "filename";
The rest of the configuration file consists of zero or more blocks. A block is given by a block name, followed by the block definition, as in:
BODY {
font-size: 12pt;
font-family: Helvetica;
text-align: justify
}
The block definition, enclosed by curly braces: { }, consists of key-value pairs and/or other blocks. A key-value pair consists of the key name followed by a colon, followed by the value. Blocks and key-value pairs are separated by semicolons. The semicolon may be omitted after a block.
Several blocks can share the same definition. The block names are then separated be commas, as in:
H2, H4, H6 { font-style: italic }
A comment in a configuration file starts with the characters
"/*" and ends with "*/":
@html2ps {
seq-number: 1; /* Automatic numbering of headings */
}
Here are some definitions of terms used below:
All blocks, except one: the @html2ps
block, coincides with a subset of the
Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 CSS2 Specification.
The following default settings for html2ps illustrate just about everything
that currently can be used from the CSS2 specification:
BODY {
font-family: Times;
font-size: 11pt;
text-align: left;
background: white;
}
H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 {
font-weight: bold;
margin-top: 0.8em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
H1 { font-size: 19pt }
H2 { font-size: 17pt }
H3 { font-size: 15pt }
H4 { font-size: 13pt }
H5 { font-size: 12pt }
H6 { font-size: 11pt }
P, OL, UL, DL, BLOCKQUOTE, PRE {
margin-top: 1em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
P {
line-height: 1.2em;
text-indent: 0;
}
OL, UL, DD { margin-left: 2em }
TT, KBD, PRE { font-family: Courier }
PRE { font-size: 9pt }
BLOCKQUOTE {
margin-left: 1em;
margin-right: 1em;
}
ADDRESS {
margin-top: 0.5em;
margin-bottom: 0.5em;
}
TABLE {
margin-top: 1.3em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
}
DIV.noprint { display: none }
DEL { text-decoration: line-through }
A:link, HR { color: black }
@page {
margin-left: 2.5cm;
margin-right: 2.5cm;
margin-top: 3cm;
margin-bottom: 3cm;
}
@html2ps
This block is used to specify parameters that are specific to
html2ps, and not covered by CSS2. The @html2ps block has
several sub-blocks and key-value pairs, these are described in this section.
package block
This block is used to specify which program packages are installed on the system. Typically, this is done in the global configuration file.
PerlMagick
ImageMagick
pbmplus
netpbm
djpeg
Ghostscript
TeX
dvips
libwww-perl
jfriedl
geturl
lynx -source
-mime_header" or "url_get -h".
check
path
paper block
The paper size is defined in this block. The size can either be given as one of the recognized paper types or by giving explicit values for the paper height and width. As of version 1.0 beta2, one can also use the @page block in CSS2 for the paper size. The paper block is kept for backwards compatibility. Also, one can only specify explicit dimensions in @page, not any paper types by name.
type
height
width
option block
This block is used to set default values for the command line options. The key in the key-value pair is the option name, in either its long or short form.
twoup (on the command line: -2 or --twoup)
base (on the command line: -b URL or --base URL)
check (on the command line: -c or --check)
toc (on the command line: -C string or --toc string)
rev=TOC in the converted document.
debug (on the command line: -d or --debug)
DSC (on the command line: -D or --DSC)
encoding (on the command line: -e encoding or --encoding encoding)
rcfile (on the command line: -f file[:file[:...]] or --rcfile file[:file[:...]])
frame (on the command line: -F or --frame)
grayscale (on the command line: -g or --grayscale)
help (on the command line: -h or --help)
hyphenate (on the command line: -H or --hyphenate)
scaleimage (on the command line: -i num or --scaleimage num)
cookie (on the command line: -k file or --cookie file)
language (on the command line: -l lang or --language lang)
landscape (on the command line: -L or --landscape)
scalemath (on the command line: -m num or --scalemath num)
number (on the command line: -n or --number)
startno (on the command line: -N num or --startno num)
output (on the command line: -o file or --output file)
original (on the command line: -O or --original)
<OBJECT data="figure.ps" type="application/postscript">
<OBJECT data="figure.gif" type="image/gif">
<PRE>[Maybe some ASCII art for text browsers]</PRE>
</OBJECT>
</OBJECT>
rootdir (on the command line: -r path or --rootdir path)
xref (on the command line: -R or --xref)
scaledoc (on the command line: -s num or --scaledoc num)
style (on the command line: -S string or --style string)
titlepage (on the command line: -t or --titlepage)
text (on the command line: -T or --text)
underline (on the command line: -u or --underline)
colour (on the command line: -U or --colour)
version (on the command line: -v or --version)
web (on the command line: -W string or --web string)
<LINK rel=NEXT>" in the document.
duplex (on the command line: -x num or --duplex num)
margin block
This block is used to specify page margins. The left, right, top and bottom margins, previously defined with this block, should now be defined using the @page construction from CSS2.
middle
xref block
At every hyperlink (to within the set of converted documents)
it is possible to have a cross reference inserted. The xref
block is used to control this function.
text
passes
quote block
Language specific quotation marks are defined in this block. These quotation marks are used with the HTML 4.01 element Q for short quotations. Quotation marks are predefined for a few languages (English, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian (also Nynorsk and Bokmål), Finnish, Spanish, French, German and Italian). It is possible to define different quotation marks for quotes within quotes.
A quotation mark is defined as a string, using the same encoding as the converted document (normally ISO-8859-1), and/or with character entities. Note that quotation mark characters for several languages are not included in ISO-8859-1, and their corresponding character entities were not been defined prior to HTML 4.0.
Quotation marks for a language can be defined explicitly in a sub-block
of the quote block. One can also identify the set of quotation
marks with another previously defined language, using a key-value pair.
The sub-block/key name should equal the language code as defined in
ISO 639. The language sub-block can have the following key-values:
open
close
open.
open2
open.
close2
close.
Example: English and Spanish use the same set of quotation marks – at least according to my book on typography. These (already known to html2ps) are defined with:
quote {
en {
open: "“";
close: "”";
open2: "`";
close2: "'";
}
es: en;
}
toc block
When a table of contents (ToC) is generated from document headings and titles, the appearance is controlled by this block.
heading
level
indent
titlepage block
When a title page is generated, its appearance is controlled by this block.
content
<DIV align=center>
<H1><BIG>$T</BIG></H1>
<H2>$[author]</H2></DIV>".
margin-top
font block
Currently, html2ps recognizes the fonts: Times,
New-Century-Schoolbook, Helvetica, Helvetica-Narrow, Palatino, Avantgarde,
Bookman, and Courier. To add a new font (family), choose a name (consisting
of letters, digits, hyphens, and underscores) for the font. Then define a
sub-block to the font block, with the same name as the chosen
font name. This block can contain two key-value pairs:
names
files
Example: A font 'myfont' has its four font styles defined in local files. To use this font in all tables in the converted documents, one can use something like:
TABLE { font-family: myfont }
@html2ps {
font {
myfont {
names: "MyFont-Roman MyFont-Italic MyFont-Bold MyFont-BoldItalic";
files: "/x/y/myfr.pfa /x/y/myfi.pfa /x/y/myfb.pfa /x/y/myfbi.pfa";
}
}
}
hyphenation block
Hyphenation pattern files for different languages are specified in sub-blocks within this block. The blocks names should equal the language code as defined in ISO 639. These language blocks can contain the following two key-values:
file
extfile
in-fra-struc-ture white-space".
For example, for English (with language code 'en') one can have a block like:
en {
file: "/opt/tex/lib/macros/hyphen.tex";
extfile: "/opt/tdb/lib/html2ps/enhyphext";
}
The hyphenation block itself can furthermore have these
key-values:
min
start
end
header block
This block is used to specify page headers. It is possible to define left, center, and right headers. Different headers for odd and even pages can be specified. Some symbols can be used that will expand to document title, author, date etc. See below.
left
alternate flag in this
block is set to 1, this will be the right header on even pages.
center
right
alternate flag in this
block is set to 1, this will be the left header on even pages.
odd-left
odd-center
odd-right
even-left
even-center
even-right
font-family
font-size
font-style
font-weight
color
alternate
left and right keys should change place on
even pages. Typically used for double sided printing.
The default is 1.
footer block
This block is used to specify page footers. It is possible to define left, center, and right footers. Different footers for odd and even pages can be specified. Some symbols can be used that will expand to document title, author, date etc. See below.
left
alternate flag in
this block is set to 1, this will be the right footer on even pages.
center
right
alternate flag in
this block is set to 1, this will be the left footer on even pages.
odd-left
odd-center
odd-right
even-left
even-center
even-right
font-family
font-size
font-style
font-weight
color
alternate
left and right keys should change place on
even pages. Typically used for double sided printing.
The default is 1.
frame block
The appearance of the optional frame (drawn on each page) is controlled by this block.
width
margin
color
justify block
This block specifies the maximum amount of extra space inserted between words and letters when text justification is in effect.
word
letter
draft block
It is possible to have some text written in a large font diagonally across each page. Typically this is a word, written in a very light colour, indicating that the document is a draft.
text
print
<META name="Status" content="Draft">.
dir
font-family
font-style
font-weight
color
colour block
The 16 standard colour names from HTML 4.01 (although their
use in HTML elements are now deprecated) are recognized by html2ps.
Use this block to extend this list of colours. This is done with
key-value pairs, where the key is the colour name, and the value is
the colour given as a hexadecimal RGB value, for example: "brown:
A52A2A;".
@html2ps block
html2psrc
imgalt
"[IMAGE]".
datefmt
datefmt key specifies the
format used. The syntax is the same as in the strftime(3) routine. The
default is "%e %b %Y %R", which gives a date
string like "15 Aug 2000 22:32".
locale
datefmt. If unspecified, the value
is taken from environment variables, see setlocale(3). No default.
doc-sep
"<!--NewPage-->", which will cause
a page break. You may use (almost) any HTML code, for example
"<HR><HR>" or
"<IMG src=...>".
ball-radius
numbstyle
showurl
seq-number
extrapage
break-table
forms
textarea-data
page-break
<!--NewPage--> etc, as
specified below. The default is 1.
expand-acronyms
spoof
ssi
<!--#include file=...>,
<!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED">,
<!--#config timefmt=...>. The default is 1.
prefilled
The following symbols can be used on the title page, the page headers/footers, and in the heading for the table of contents:
Symbols of the form "$[name]"
will expand to the value of the content attribute of
META elements, having either of the attributes
"name=name" or
"http-equiv=name" (case insensitive string matching).
For example, when a document containing:
<META name="expires" content="31 Dec 2001">
is converted, using a configuration file with:
footer { left: "Expires: $[expires]" }
this left footer will be inserted:
Expires: 31 Dec 2001
In addition, these symbols are defined:
$T
$A
<META name="Author"
content="..."> in the document head.
$U
$N
$H
$D
datefmt key.
So $A is equivalent to $[author], but kept for
backwards compatibility.
To avoid symbol expansion, precede the dollar sign with a backslash,
as in "\$T".
I imagine that a typical use of configuration files can be something along the following lines.
System specific definitions (e.g. specification of available program packages) and global defaults (paper type etc) are defined in the global configuration file.
If there is more than one user of the program on the system, each user can also have a personal configuration file with his/hers own personal preferences. (On a single user system one can use the global configuration file for this purpose as well.)
One may also develop a collection of configuration files for typical situations. These files are placed in a directory that is searched by html2ps (the search path is defined with the environment variable HTML2PSPATH). For example, to print a document as slides – in landscape mode, with large text in Helvetica, and a thick frame – one can create a configuration file, called 'slides' say, containing:
@html2ps {
option {
landscape: 1;
frame: 1;
}
frame { width: 3pt }
}
BODY {
font-family: Helvetica;
font-size: 20pt;
}
H1 { font-size: 35pt }
H2 { font-size: 32pt }
H3 { font-size: 29pt }
H4 { font-size: 26pt }
H5 { font-size: 23pt }
H6 { font-size: 20pt }
PRE { font-size: 18pt }
Then use the command:
html2ps -f slides ...
to convert the document. Note that with this command the file 'slides' is used instead of the personal configuration file. If you want both to be used, giving precedence to definitions made in the file 'slides', use the command:
html2ps -f :slides ...
(The page breaks between the slides can for example be generated by
adding '<HR class=PAGE-BREAK>' to the HTML document.)
For features that are frequently turned on and off, and that cannot be controlled by command line options, it may be a good idea to create small configuration files as "building blocks". For example a file 'A4' for printing on A4 paper (if you have some other default paper type):
@html2ps { paper { type: A4 } }
and a file 'hnum' for automatic numbering of headings:
@html2ps { seq-number: 1 }
Combining this with the previous example: to convert a document for printing on A4 sized slides with all headings numbered, use the command:
html2ps -f :slides:A4:hnum ...
There is not yet much support for internationalization, as specified in
HTML 4.0. A few character encodings, other than the old
default ISO-8859-1, are supported. The element Q for short
quotations is implemented (quotation marks are chosen based on current
language). It is also possible to make language dependent
hyphenation, using hyphenation pattern files from
the TeX distribution. The lang attribute (recognized for a
few elements) is used to determine the language of the document, or for
a particular section.
It is possible to convert documents using some other character encodings than the old default ISO-8859-1. Currently the Japanese encodings EUC-JP, SHIFT-JIS, and ISO-2022-JP (7-bit) are recognized. EUC encoded documents in other languages, such as Chinese (EUC-CN), and Korean (EUC-KR) will probably work as well. I have no such font available, so I have not been able to test this myself.
You must of course have access to PostScript fonts for these languages and encodings. For Japanese you can use the free Wadalab fonts and associated tools. These fonts can be used together with Ghostscript to print on a printer that does not have such fonts.
Of the three Japanese encodings, EUC-JP works best with html2ps. The 7-bit encoding ISO-2022-JP, found in several documents on the web, is a bad choice for HTML documents. This is because the encoding uses characters that have a special function in HTML, such as '<'. Often this results in incorrect HTML code, and html2ps as well as browsers will of course have problems rendering these documents.
There is not yet any automatic detection of the encoding, this must be explicitly specified with the option -e, or in a configuration file. If you for example would like to convert a document with EUC-JP encoding, you can use a configuration file like:
BODY { font-family: eucjp }
@html2ps {
option {
encoding: "EUC-JP";
}
font {
eucjp {
names: "Ryumin-Light-EUC-H";
}
}
}
The name Ryumin-Light-EUC-H should be changed into the
PostScript font name for the font to be used, here with EUC-JP encoding.
The name eucjp can be changed to something else, as long
as it is the same in the BODY and font blocks.
You may not (yet) use a font having vertical writing mode.
The support for Japanese has only recently been added, and so far only been tested by me. Unfortunately, I do not know any Japanese, and cannot verify that what comes out is correct. Also, the line breaking is probably not correctly done.
Please let me know if you are aware of any free PostScript fonts for Chinese, Korean, etc.
The character entity ­ can be used to explicitly specify possible hyphenation points.
It is also possible to get automatic hyphenation of the text. This requires hyphenation pattern files from the TeX distribution. A hyphenation pattern file for English is included with html2ps. Pattern files for other languages are available from the CTAN archives in, for example
The hyphenation patterns for words containing only ASCII characters should work correctly. But it may be problems with other words, since the authors of these hyphenation pattern files use different (but in TeX equivalent) syntax to represent non-ASCII characters.
Please note that although TeX hyphenation patterns are used, the algorithm used is not as sophisticated as in TeX. In fact, you should not expect TeX quality in any part of this program!
(This is incomplete.)
The CELLSPACING attribute of the TABLE element is not implemented as described in the specification; instead the value of the CELLPADDING attribute is increased by half the value of CELLSPACING.
Rendering HTML tables well is a non-trivial task. For "real" tables, that is representation of tabular data, html2ps usually generates reasonably good output. When tables are used for layout purposes, the result varies from good to useless. This is because a table cell is never broken across pages. So if a table contains a cell with a lot of content, the entire table may have to be scaled down in size in order to make this cell fit on a single page. Sometimes this may even result in unreadable output.
Page breaks are occasionally done in bad places: for example directly after a (long) heading, and before the last line in a paragraph.
Actually, what really needs to be done is a complete rewriting of the code. It started out as a small hack – originally a sed script – and has now grown substantially, but it is still a hack... It is quite unlikely that this rewriting will take place, though – at least not in the near future.
Better Support for style sheets. Currently, a small part of CSS2 is supported, but only in the form of personal style sheets (using configuration files); style information within HTML documents is ignored.
All new features added have made the script quite large, and significantly slower than earlier versions. I will try to find some way to speed it up somewhat.
I am grateful for all suggestions how to improve html2ps. In fact, many of the current features have been implemented after suggestions from other users.
By default html2ps produces PostScript code that is not DSC compliant. The practical implication of this is that it will not be possible to use the code with PostScript filters for n-up printing, reordering of pages, etc. It is also not possible to jump to a certain page directly in previewers such as Ghostview.
The advantage with the non-DSC code is that it can be 'reused' by html2ps: you can rebuild an already generated PostScript file using new command line options and configuration files. This is done by running html2ps with the new options, and with the old PostScript file as input. This can save a lot of time and bandwidth when converting remote documents.
It is possible to generate DSC compliant PostScript by using the option -D, but this requires that Ghostscript is installed, and it can take quite some time to do. Note: if you are producing PostScript files for others to download, it is strongly recommended that you generate DSC compliant code.
A few extensions to HTML 4.01 are recognized by html2ps:
<HR class=PAGE-BREAK> <?page-break> <!--NewPage-->
<DIV class=NOPRINT>
This will not be printed...
</DIV>
This can be used to avoid getting navigation bars etc in the printout.
The PostScript code generated by html2ps contains calls to the
pdfmark operator, that are instructions to a PostScript-to-PDF
converter (such as version 5.0 or later of Aladdin Ghostscript, or Adobe
Acrobat Distiller). These instructions generate hyperlinks in the PDF
document, from the hyperlinks in the original HTML documents. A PDF outline
entry, or bookmark, is also generated from the HTML headings.
By default the links in the PDF document will be represented by a box
with a border. You may instead have the link text coloured, by for example
specifying 'A:link { color: red }' in a configuration file,
and use the option -U when converting.
Here follow some addresses where one can obtain software used by html2ps. Several of these programs are available from many other program archives. Also note that not all packages are needed.
Please note that html2ps comes with no support (this is unpaid work done on my spare time). However, I am interested in making the program as useful as possible, so do not hesitate to report any problems. But please carry out the following steps first:
If you, after inspecting the results from these steps, believe that there is a problem with html2ps; mail the content of the file 'html2ps.dbg' together with a description of the problem to html2ps-bugs@tdb.uu.se. If you fail to produce the file 'html2ps.dbg', instead please include as much details as possible: the version of html2ps, The Perl version, your platform, etc.
Please also include the HTML document, or a URL – preferably containing a minimal example illustrating the problem.
There are several persons that have been helpful with the development of this program – by supplying patches, suggesting improvements, etc. I have most certainly forgot a few names; please forgive me if you are missing your name in this list: John Bowe, Neil Bowers, Reinhard Denner, Russell Locke, Thomas Mohr, Craig Oda, Dave Raggett, John Sinues, Larry W. Virden, and Chenxi Wang. My colleagues at the Department of Scientific Computing have also been a great help by testing early versions of the program.
Jan Kärrman