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

