[tex4ht] unbalanced parentheses

[William F Hammond]

Dear Friends,

A recent item at arxiv.org -- 1108.5305 -- fails to run through
tex4ht targeted for xhtml+mathml, i.e., mk4ht xhmlatex, because
it has nearly 40 instances in its source of unbalanced parentheses.

Since the source will run correctly through pdflatex, there is
a sense in which it may be considered correct as LaTeX.  On the
other hand, the unbalanced parentheses represent mathematical
errors (typographical in nature), and I think it unreasonable
to view it as correct LaTeX and I see no reason to find fault
with tex4ht on this account.

Nonetheless it is a dilemma in the context of translation from
LaTeX to xhtml+mathml or, for that matter, html5+mathml, if the
source is understood as correct LaTeX.

This document presents a good case-in-point to support my idea of
formalizing LaTeX profiles,
https://www.tug.org/members/TUGboat/tb31-2/tb98hammond.pdf or
http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/presentations/Tug2010/, where such
author errors can, for suitable profiles, be trapped on the author's
platform.

                                    -- Bill