[tlug] Locking an HTML Doc

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

CL writes:

The word you want is "stylesheet".

It's absolutely possible to provide HTML files with portable styles.
The technology is called "CSS".  However, it could be painful to get
to nice-looking output, both on-screen and printed out of an HTML
source file.

 > I have a document of 14 pages that was created in LibreOffice as an
 > .odt original and then exported as a .pdf file for sending to a
 > client.  The client has subsequently asked to have the document
 > saved in HTML format, which LibreOffice can do.  But, the result,
 > when viewed in my browser, is FUGLY.

Does the client care if it's FUGLY in your browser, or is that just
false pride speaking?

 > The doc was prepared using Times New Roman and MS Mincho, on an A4
 > page, with 2cm Left, Right, Top margins and a 1.5cm Bottom margin

Pay Darren (or similar facsimile) to write you a stylesheet to do the
above.  (I cost way too much pay/performance -- I'll demand pay by the
hour, including training -- and I don't know how to do it yet, I only
know it's possible! ;-)

 > with page numbering in the footer.

Correct page numbering is probably not going to happen in static HTML,
but I could be wrong.

 > That's what I want the Client to see when they open the file and I
 > want anyone else who opens it to also see the same fonts, graphics,
 > and layout -- e.g. I want it to play the same on any machine that
 > can parse HTML ...

*You* really don't want that, believe me.  You want to argue with your
client to stick to PDF if that's what *they* say they want.  It is
simply impossible to achieve what you want with HTML (to start with,
anybody can set their browser to ignore your stylesheet, people with
accessibility issues will probably have overrides, and there are folks
like me who dick with their local stylesheets "just because").

You need to decide how far you and your client want to go down that
road.  It's possible to go quite a ways, but the HTML end of the
cess-web just isn't designed for that -- at some point you want to use
PDF or similar.  (Most graphical web browsers have been able to
natively display PDF for a couple of years, so I'm not sure I see
*any* point to your client's request.)