gkrueger.com - HTML2RTF

Introduction

This section presents an HTML to RTF compiler which was developed at the Hospital of Itzehoe, Germany. It accepts HTML 2.0 source (plus some extensions) and generates fully linked RTF files that could be compiled into HLP files using the Windows 3.x help compiler. The compiler was written by Robin Gressmann, who was then an undergraduate in applied mathematics at Fachhochschule Flensburg. Parts of the design and documentation were contributed by myself. Comments, questions, etc. should be mailed directly to Robin, as I'm not able to do any support on the program.

Disclaimer of warranty

HTML2RTF is subject to the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. Generally spoken, you're allowed to use the program in the intended sense, and you may copy and redistribute the program under several restrictions. However, the author does not make any warranty regarding the software or its documentation. You may use the software fully on your own risk.

Installation

The compiler consists of 4 files, which can be downloaded using the following links:

HTML2RTF.ZIP is the executable for MS-DOS. Is has been written in GNU-C/C++ 2.5.7 and requires the GNU protected mode manager GO32.EXE and at least an 80386 for execution. If you do not have GO32.EXE, here's a compressed version GO32.ZIP for downloading. As far as I know, you just have to copy GO32.EXE into your program path to allow execution of HTML2RTF.EXE.
MANUAL.ZIP contains a couple of HTML files which comprise the compiler documentation. Also included are the files JOB.BAT and SIZES.DEF which will support your first attempts in creating help files.
TOOL.ZIP contains a batch file and two AWK scripts which help in creating multi-file translation projects.
QUELLEN.ZIP contain all the source and header files and the makefile to build HTML2RTF with GNU-C/C++. The compiler has been written in classical top-down fashion known as recursive-descent parsing. To get arbitrary deep insights into this technique, you could read "Compilers" by Aho, Sethi and Ullmann.

Usage

Unfortunately, the manuals are currently in german. Sooner or later, we'll convert them to english, but there is no time to do it now. If anybody wants to do that job, we'll highly appreciate it. Send a short mail to me or Robin and we're gonna start ASAP.

OK, if you're not feeling sufficiently prepared for reading german man pages today, here are some hints for getting started:

Install HTML2RTF.EXE as described above.
Write your HTML source files according to the HTML 2.0 description as given in RFC1866. Although we're currently not supporting everything mentioned there, most of the tags could be used. Furthermore, HTML2RTF supports some extensions over 2.0. For example, try your luck with colors or tables.
Create a definition file SIZES.DEF. It will be used to configure various parameters which are of needed during compiling.
Translate the HTML files into RTF files using HTML2RTF.
Feed the resulting RTF files[s] into the Windows help compiler HC31. For your convenience, HTML2RTF also created the required help project file. Now you should have a working HLP file which could be called using the Windows help program.

Enjoy it!

Ports

Some friendly people have ported HTML2RTF to different platforms and have mailed me about their efforts. Thanks again for your work. If you also made a port to a platform not mentioned here, please notice me. For further details about these ports please get in direct contact with the developers mentioned below:

Silicon Graphics IRIX: Petter Reinholdtsen at pere@td.org.uit.no (Homepage).
MS Visual C++ 4.2: David McKellar at dmick@interlog.com
GCC 2.7.2 MS-DOS: My own quick hack for recent GNU-Compiler. Does no longer require go32 and may run better on NT. I also removed a lot of compiler warnings. I did not do exhaustive testing, so any feedback is highly appreciated. The file port272.zip contains both sources and MS-DOS executable.