lkoelman / phd-thesis-web

Interactive web version of my PhD thesis (https://lkoelman.github.io/phd-thesis-web)

I published a web version of my PhD thesis here because I wanted to increase exposure/searchability and decrease the barrier to access.

The process of turning the original LaTeX source code into a static website was quite straightforward, making use of tex4ht/make4ht. There were some tricky parts however, and some of the answers and examples on the web are outdated. To provide a template for others, I described the conversion and publishing process below.

LaTeX thesis to HTML conversion

Install tex4ht

Install TexLive latex distribution > 2019. You want a recent version in order to have fully featured tex4ht and make4ht commands. If the default version in your distribution's repositories is outdated, install manually (for Ubuntu, you can use a script like install-tl-ubuntu).

Preprocess tex source files

• remove latex imports specific to PDF generation

• remove commands that don't play well with MathJax:

  • \mathrm, \textrm, rm
  • to do this automatically, you could for example use the following regular expressions with Sublime text's 'replace in files' function: find: \\mathrm\s*?\{(.+?)\} -> replace: $1

• use simple bibtex for citations. Don't use biblatex or natbib.

  • Bibliography styles unsrt, plain, and plainurl worked well for me. More complex ones like agsm produced htlatex errors.

Configure build process

I based my configuration files on https://github.com/michal-h21/tex4ht-enhanced-web with minor modifications. I altered and annotated the build files to make it clear what they are doing, and removed some superfluous options.

Crucially, in order for compilation of the static html site structure to work, I needed to explicitly specify the output directory and build file in the make4ht command. My final build command was make4ht -c config.cfg -e build.mk4 -d out index.tex "mathjax

Deploy to github pages

Move the output folder into a new GitHub repository in a branch named gh-pages. If you're publishing as a project site, you must use the gh-pages branch. This is not clear from the GitHub documentation at the time of writing. Otherwise, if it is a user/organization site (user.github.io), you can use the master branch.