Document Segmentation[*]

Subsections

One of the greatest appeals of the World-Wide Web is its high connectivity through hyper-links. As we have seen, the LATEX author can provide these links either manually or symbolically. Manual links are more tedious because a URL must be provided by the author for every link, and updated every time the target documents change. Symbolic links are more convenient, because the translator keeps track of the URLs. Earlier releases of LATEX2HTML required the entire document to be processed together if it was to be linked symbolically. However it was easy for large documents to overwhelm the memory capacities of moderate-sized computers. Furthermore, processing time could become prohibitively high, if even a small change required the entire document to be reprocessed.


For these reasons, program segmentation was developed. This feature enables the author to subdivide his document into multiple segments. Each segment can be processed independently by LATEX2HTML. Hypertext links between segments can be made symbolically, with references shared through auxiliary files. If a single segment changes, only that segment needs to be reprocessed (unless a label is changed that another segment requires). Furthermore, the entire document can be processed without modification by LATEX to obtain the printed version.


The top level segment that LATEX reads is called the parent segment.
The others are called child segments.


Document segmentation does require a little more work on the part of the author, who will now have to undertake some of the book-keeping formerly performed by LATEX2HTML. The following four LATEX extensions carry out segmentation:


\begin{htmllist}\htmlitemmark{BlueBall}%
\index{segment@\Lc{segment}}%
\item [ \...
...kground of in the document
should have the color \Meta{color}~.%
\end{htmllist}

The use of the segmenting commands is best illustrated by the examplesec:segmentexample below. You might want to check your segmented document for consistency using the -unsegmentunsegment command line option.



Footnotes

... Segmentation[*]
This feature is supported only for users of LATEX2e.