HTML to Text

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• To specify bullets and other special characters, enter the actual character(s), or enter 3 digit ascii code(s).
• Pairs of "quote" characters are often used to provide emphasis -- with different pairs used for different types of text emphasis.

Notes

Using high ascii characters

High ascii (non-keyboard) characters are often useful as bullets, lines, and emphasis characters. Often, you can specify a high ascii character by entering a 3 (decimal) digit value.

For example: X and 88 are equivalent.

Yes, this example is not "high ascii"! That's because there is a small problem using high ascii -- the actual character displayed is context specific. For example, browsers might use a URL encoding rule to display high ascii characters, while text editors might use a country specific code-page. For example, compare the "code page" rendition (verbally described) and the URL mapping your browser is using

• 219 : often a black box : URL mapping= Û
• 174 : often a <<: URL mapping= ®
• 186 : often a || : URL mapping= º
• 251 : often a "square root" sign : URL mapping= û

Using infinite line lengths

If you intend to import your text file into a word processor, or into any program that can wrap long lines, you probably should use infinite line lengths. This basically means that each paragraph is on a single line; with seperate paragraphs on seperate lines.

Note that this does not apply to lines in a table.

How to display IMG information

Enter one of the following values:

• -3 : Do not display (ignore all IMG elements)
• -2 : Just display the pre and post img characters
• -1 : Display a reference number (and generate a SRC and ALT reference list at the bottom of the text file)
• 0 : Display all characters in an ALT attribute
• 1 : Display, at most, current linelength characters from an ALT attribute
• nnn: Display, at most, nnn characters from an ALT attribute.
  For example 30 means display at most 30 characters of the ALT attribute

Using special quote characters for emphasis

To indicate different kinds of textual emphasis, such as italics, the text can be bracketed by special "quote characters". Typically, a pair of quote characters are used: one for the left side (preceding the text), and another for the right side (following the text). For example:

• [ and ] are the default quote characters for image labels;
• the high-ascii equivalents of << and >> are the defaults for links.

Minimum column width adjustment

The minimum column width adjustmen is used to augment cell widths. Non-zero value will increase narrow cell widths, and decrease wide cells.

• Small values (say, 6) are useful when short words are being clipped in narrow columns
• Large values (say, 60) will tend to make all cells the same size.
• 0 means "no adjustment"

Character width

Character width (in pixels) is used to to convert pixel widths (as used in WIDTH attributes of table cells) into character equivalents. By default, HTML_TXT assumes that an 80 character wide text file is being mapped to a 640 pixel wide screen, hence the default character width is 8.

If you increase LINELEN (say, to 128), you should consider adjusting the CHARWIDTH (say, to 5).

Hierarchical outline

HTML_TXT can use <Hn> (n=1,.2,..,7) to create a hierarchical outline; a list of numbered list of section titles, with the numbering reflecting section and subsection.

For example:

 I)Main section

This is the main section

 I.a)Subsection
  Subsection 1 starts here
  and we also have a

 I.a.1) Sub subsection

  which contains very lttle

 I.b)Sub section 2
      This is the second subsection.
  

In the above example: <H2>, <H3>, <H4>, and an <H3> heading could have created the I), I.a), I.a.1), and I.b) headings (respectively).Note that since <H1> is considered a "page heading", outline numbering starts with <H2> headings.

Converting tables to lists

In some cases, the display of complicated tables may be quite messy -- such as when the level of nesting becomes large. Should this happen, you can try displaying tables as unordered (<UL>) lists, or as seperate paragraphs seperated by horizontal rules (<HR>).

Since problems are most likely to occur with nested tables (rather then main tables), you can select whether to convert main tables, or just nested tables. In fact, you can even select whether to convert all nested tables, or just highly nested tables (that is, tables within a nested table).