Index

Begin

Screen

Documents to be published at the World Wide Web must be built as Markup lists, as shown in the left frame below: The main heading gets enclosed by <h1> and </h1> Delimiters, the words belonging to a paragraph are put between a <p> start tag and a </p> end tag. <br /> makes a line break, <hr /> draws a horizontal line. Special Characters like German umlauts or quotation marks can be written in mnemonic or numerical form, like &ouml; or &#8220;. Using this additional information, the web browser renders the document on the screen in an appropriate way (right):

 

<html>
<head>
<title>A Short Story</title>
</head>
<body>
<hr /><br /><br /><br />
<h1 align = "center">
  A SHORT STORY</h1>
<p align = "center">
  <i>by D. E. Knuth</i></p>
<p style = "text-indent:0mm;
  margin-bottom:0mm"><br />
  Once upon a time, in
  a distant galaxy called
  &Ouml;&ouml;&ccedil;, there
  lived a computer named
  R.&nbsp;J. Drofnats.</p>
<p style = "text-indent:20pt;
  margin-top:0mm">
  Mr.&nbsp;Drofnats&#8212;or
  &#8220;R. J.,&#8221;
  as he preferred to be
  called&#8212;was happiest
  when he was at work
  typesetting beautiful
  documents.</p>
<br /><br /><br /><hr />
</body>
</html>



A SHORT STORY

by D. E. Knuth


Once upon a time, in a distant galaxy called Ööç, there lived a computer named R. J. Drofnats.

Mr. Drofnats—or “R. J.,” as he preferred to be called—was hap­piest when he was at work typesetting beautiful documents.




 

A writer cannot predict exactly how the content of the document, which is marked up in that way, gets rendered by the readers’ various internet browsers. For instance, line breaking often depends on window width, and some special characters may not be available on the user’s system.

Print

Documents for high-quality Print are stored in files of a different kind, filled with information about the shape and precise position of every single letter. These files are not read­able for humans directly. From the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for example, you can download the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language specification (XHTMLXHTML) in Portable Document Format (PDF) for print with Adobe Acrobat Reader – and you can use Gerolf Markup Shredder (GMS) to create such portable documents out of your hypertext files.

However, Markup Shredder still is buggy and incomplete. Until now, it cannot handle auto-width tables, and it supports only a subset of HTML element tagselement tags, attributesattributes and Cas­cading Style Sheet (CSS) propertiesproperties. Users should acquire basic knowledgebasic knowledge of the markup language be­cause it is often necessary to modify an input file to get a satisfactory PDF conversion. The type­setting is done by an old program called TeX, which is said to have an error-free kernel and to be able to produce high-quality print files.

Interface

Markup Shredder runs under Li­nux, Dos and Windows on Intel-386 com­pat­ible machines. It comes with three different user interfaces for the menu items, which form the index of this handbook:

Work

When started for the first time, GMS will Open the file de­fault.htmde­fault.htm, a small, but non-trivial markup file. Now you can do the following:

Appendix