NAME

vhtml.pl - The Voynich HTML formatter


SYNOPSIS

perl vhtml.pl [OPTIONS] [files]

vhtml.pl is intended to be used in a pipe. It is ideal for collaboration with viat.pl. But you can give a file on the command line. The output is always written to the standard output, so you have to redirect or pipe it to somewhere.


DESCRIPTION

For the case of analysis, the plain text representation of a Voynich manuscript transcription fits perfect.

But if you want to look at the text or you want to compare the text to some photos of the manuscript, you may find it helpful to see a nice formatted HTML version using the EVA Hand 1 font.

And probably you do not want to see the comments (written in curly brackets) formatted in the EVA font - it is not readable...

So I wrote this little script, which creates a nice formatted output.

The manuscript text is formatted in EVA Hand font and black color. It is designed to make reading easier by alternating background colors in the lines.

Comments and line locators are formatted in a smaller font size and grey color, so they should not disturb you, but you can read them.

Some special spacing characters, the ! and the % are formatted in a smaller font size and green color, so you can see their existance.

If the lowercased, basic EVA is used, some standard ligatures are generated by uppercasing letters.


OPTIONS

-t title or --title=title
Set the HTML document title.

There is no check for a legal title. You can use tags, illegal characters or stranger things if you want to get unpredictable results.

If you do not set any title, the text ``HTML formatted Voynich output'' is used.

b color-spec or background=color-spec
Set the background color of the resulting HTML document.

f color-spec or foreground=color-spec
Set the text color of the resulting HTML document.

The text color is used for EVA output, for the title and for meta informations.

c color-spec or comment=color-spec
Set the comment color of the resulting HTML document.

The comment color is used for inlined comments and for the line locators.

s color-spec or space=color-spec
Set the color for special space characters.

e color-spec or evenrow=color-spec
Set the background color for even numbered rows of the EVA output.

o color-spec or oddrow=color-spec
Set the background color for odd numbered rows of the EVA output.


EXAMPLES

Create a HTML version of the Voynich manuscript transcription by T. Takahashi with the viat.pl tool and the vhtml.pl tool.

perl viat.h -t H -w -M | perl vhtml.pl > takahasi.html


BUGS

There is no error checking at all.

The generated HTML could be nicer. At the moment, the whole output is formatted in a huge HTML table, which the browser can not render efficiently. I tried to use DIVs and positioning via CSS, but there are serious bugs in most older browsers (as IE 5.0), so I decided to format it in a table instead of forcing people to convert to Mozilla or update their software.

The formatting is done via CSS. There is no FONT tag in the generated HTML, because it is ugly. If your browser does not support CSS, try Mozilla, Opera, Amaya or a Netscape version greater than 4.0. If you use the old Netscape Navigator, expect ugly bugs and crashes - it is the most disgusting bugware I had ever seen (and I had seen a lot in twenty years of computing experience). My Netscape 4.7 (under Linux 2.2 and XFree86 4) often crashes the whole X-Server, which is an unique behaviour on my remarkable stable system.

If you do not have the EVA Hand 1 font, you see normal ASCII characters. This is not a bug in my script, but it may cause confusion.

The source is a mess. Adding more elaborated features may be difficult - better rewrite it from scratch.


AUTHOR

Michael Winkelmann, michael@weltretter.de