Converting my PhD thesis into HTML

Damien Desfontaines:

Finishing a PhD is a weird emotional experience. All the hard work, the joys, the pains, the pulled hairs, everything gets condensed into a scary-looking PDF and then you’re just… done? What? This makes no sense whatsoever. Or rather, this makes sense on paper, but then you feel this weird sense of grief somehow. And you’re not quite at the acceptance stage yet. So instead, you decide to deal with those feelings in a perfectly normal and healthy way, and you embark on a journey to compile said thesis into a series of HTML pages.

HTML, by the way, is a much better way of disseminating information than PDF. Pretty much all of recent scientific research is recorded in PDF files, for historical reasons that are largely irrelevant today. PDFs are difficult to browse, impossible to read on a phone, uncomfortable to read on a tablet, hostile to screen readers, impractical to search engines, and the list goes on. It’s just a terrible format, unless you’re trying to print things on paper. Printing things is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but that’s really not the main use case we should be optimizing for.

Anyway. I converted my thesis to HTML and this is my story. A story of false hopes, perseverance, pain, and futility. I hope this can be useful to other people, as a guide on how to do this for your own thesis or large & complex LaTeX documents, or as an encouragement to do something better with your time instead.