Nobby

Nobby converts a LaTeX file into a single HTML file + SVG images. Nobby2WP uploads the HTML file + SVG images to a Wordpress server.

The main purpose of these two tools is to only keep LaTeX files under version control, not an entire Wordpress installation.

Nobby uses SVG images to facilitate seamless scaling of all equations and text. See here for a live demonstration of the converted demo.tex file looks on a Wordpress site.

If you want to write web articles in LaTeX then Nobby may be for you. If you are looking for a way to convert your thesis to HTML then... maybe not, but feel free to try anyway!

More Information

Nobby's strategy is to copy plain text verbatim from the LaTeX file to the HTML file and convert everything else (eg. macros and environments) into SVG images. Nobby does not make any attempt to interpret LaTeX code. Everything Nobby can and cannot do is a direct consequence of this strategy.

This strategy is flexible enough to support custom macros and environments. You can even include figures and tables, use the subcaption package to organise them, and reference them like in LaTeX. The strategy is not flexible enough to reproduce page layouts (eg. two-column) or fancy page headers.

See documentation for possible gotchas and more information (you may have to build it first with make html in the doc/ folder).

The documentation also explains the plugin system to alter the HTML conversion of individual macros and environments. Plugins can, for instance, convert \ldots to '...' and \section{} to the corresponding <h1> and </h1> tags.

It may be possible to support bibliographies and table-of-contents. Patches welcome.

Examples

To see all options type

>> python nobby.py -h

Typically, you run Nobby like this:

>> python nobby.py somefile.tex

or this:

>> python nobby.py somefile.tex --scale 1.2

The --scale argument - wait for it - scales all SVG images. This is often necessary to match the font size in the SVG images to the HTML font size.

Installation

Nobby relies these external tools:

• Python >= 3.3
• NumPy
• Matplotlib
• pdfinfo
• pdf2svg
• pdfcrop
• pdflatex
• latexmk
• convert (part of ImageMagick)

To run Nobby2WP you will also need the python-wordpress-xmlrpc package.

Debian based systems like (K)Ubuntu

apt install pdf2svg texlive-extra-utils latexmk imagemagick
pip install python-wordpress-xmlrpc

RedHat / Fedora

yum install pdf2svg texlive texlive-pdfcrop latexmk ImageMagick
pip install python-wordpress-xmlrpc

Windows and OsX

No idea, but should be possible as well.

Clone Nobby

To get Nobby and run the unit tests type this:

git clone https://github.com/olitheolix/nobby.git
py.test

Quickstart

To compile demo.tex and view the result in the browser:

git clone https://github.com/olitheolix/nobby.git
python nobby.py demo/demo.tex -w

To publish it via Wordpress edit the demo/.credentials file to specify the Wordpress URL, username, password, SSH credentials, etc. Make sure you create the wp-img path (see comments).

cd demo
python ../nobby2wp.py --verify

If this succeeds then you can upload the post (as a Wordpress 'page') like this:

python ../nobby2wp.py html-demo/demo.html --type page

Login to your Wordpress site and verify that it has a new entry in the Pages tab.

Documentation

To build the documentation with Sphinx:

make -C doc/ clean html

Not what you are looking for?

You may want to try Quick Latex if you have web publishing in mind. It is an online converter for LaTeX, uses a similar strategy as Nobby, and comes with a Wordpress plugin.

Another option is latex2wp, or the related Lyx2Wordpress.

For more general LaTeX to HTML converters see latex2html, PlasTeX, and SnuggleTeX.

License

Nobby is licensed under the terms of the GPL v3.