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Author: Toby Thurston from IBM UK.

H2S is the public version of a program called HP that is widely used within IBM. H2S translates from HTML into raw Script commands. All the HTML 3.2 tags are supported.

Why would anyone want a tool that translates from HTML to Script? The answer is in order to produce a good looking print out. If you use HTML much either to store or access information you will be aware that there are times when you want to have a printed copy of the information, you may also be aware that your browser doesn't produce very beautiful output. The lines are rather too long for comfortable reading, the running heading always seems to run off the edge of the paper, headings may appear on their own at the bottom of a page, as "widow" lines, bereft of the content that should immediately follow them. Sometimes an image is split across a page boundaries, worse still some lines of text may be split across page boundaries.

H2S takes any piece of HTML that you can find on the Web and will translate it into a Script file, that you can process with Script on your mainframe system to produce an output file that can be printed on an AFP printer such as a 3820 or a 3900. The result will be a beautifully printed copy of your HTML document that is easy to read and convenient to work with.

The current version of H2S does not include any graphics or images, but to make up for this it does pay close attention to typographical details to produce very handsome text output. This makes it suitable for printing long, informative text items which you want to study carefully or give to someone else in an impressive format. It also makes it unsuitable for printing Web items that depend heavily on their graphical or other multimedia content.

H2S is written in REXX and will run on VM/CMS, MVS/TSO, OS/2, IBM PC-DOS 7.0 and any platform for which Object/REXX is available (such as Windows 95/NT).

H2S was created originally because the author needed it and is maintained on a best efforts basis in the author's spare moments. However the author welcomes all feedback about H2S. Feedback should be given by email (only please) to Toby_Thurston@uk.ibm.com.

Wish list

These are the things I am thinking about adding to H2S if and when I get time and encouragement to do so.

• Support HTML 4.0
• Support Style Sheets
• Support HTML Math
• Support graphics images in some form
• Rewrite as a Java class
• Provide different output types