Hi Vincent - mkht-scripts.4ht is generated from tex4ht-mkht.tex, I am 99% sure.

And unfortunately, no, I don't have any ingrained knowledge of how to get the necessary quoting for the .bat files (or the Unix scripts for that matter, which suffer from similar problems) through the tex4ht "literate" processing.

I have to research pretty much everything in tex4ht from first principles, and that's not going to happen today.

Best,
Karl

Hi Vincent - well, thanks for the report and patch, but not dequoting is a fundamental discrepancy between shells. I have no intention of trying to support DOS, Windows, or anything else Microsoft. If you want to, ok, but otherwise, consider it unsupported.

I wrote lit/Makefile to be a convenience on Unix (and it is far from complete); Eitan never had a Makefile at all. (Sigh.)

As far as the patch goes, htlatex is just one of many scripts. And patching it directly isn't possible, since those scripts are all generated from tex4ht-mkht.tex (and other things?) in some process I haven't internalized. So I'm afraid I can't even tell you for sure the actual source files that need to be changed.

All the Unix scripts have quoting problems too. It's all a gigantic mess and is one of the lowest-priority things to even look at :(.

sorry,
karl

In lit/Makefile we have these lines:

tex_opts = --interaction=nonstopmode #--file-line-error
tex_1opt = "$(tex_opts)"

This means that the argument passed e.g. to htlatex.bat is (with added delimitting by `and ') the following

`--interaction=nonstopmode '

i.e. there is one tailing space just after the nonstopmode.

This confuses latex (as called by htlatex.bat) which outputs the following error message

latex: Invalid option argument.
latex: Data: nonstopmode
latex: Invalid option argument.
latex: Data: nonstopmode
latex: Invalid option argument.
latex: Data: nonstopmode

I.e. latex does not know `nonstopmode ', but only `nonstopmode'.

The root cause for the problem is that when passing argument to a MSDOS batch, the argument is not de-quoted. That is to say, assume that I have some batch toto.bat as follows

some_exe.exe %1

and I call

toto.bat "a b c"

Then %1 will expand to "a b c", and therefore the command some_exe.exe will be passed only one argument that is `a b c', instead of 3 arguments a, b and c, which is the intention.

This means that the patch which I propose as attached is not really a definitive solution --- if ever there would be more than one option, that would not work any longer. Instead, to follow the intention of tex_1opt Makefile variable double-quoting in order to pass several options just as one argument, one needs in htlatex.bat some explicit code in order to do the de-quoting --- that would by the same way solve the tailing space issue, so the same lit/Makefile as currently could be reverted.

I will try to propose this in another post, I need some more thinking how to do that in MSDOS --- if ever feasible, DOS is no longer maintained, and quite unpractical a language.