What compromises must I make?

As a LaTeX user, you need to be aware that some macros or facilities don't transfer to other formats, either because they are not supported by the target format or because the converter does not support them. Example of this are the footnote macro, and all maths formatting.

Sometimes LaTeX facilities must be accessed in a slightly different way to support the variety of formats, particularly hypertext formats where LaTeX references are often replaced by hypertext jumps (but must still look right in printed documentation). Tables don't transfer well to RTF (and not at all to the other formats) but an attempt is made to approximate tables so long as special row macros are used, instead of the usual end of row delimiter.

Bibliographies are handled quite well since the utilities can read in .bib files and resolve citations. Bibliographies are not yet supported in Windows Help files, and the references are not yet sorted alphabetically. Numbers are used in citations.

Pictures are handled in a limited way: if the PSBOX macro package is used, an image macro can be used to place Encapsulated PostScript files in LaTeX, and Windows RGB-encoded bitmap files when converting to RTF.

Paragraph indentation is a little weak at present, but some is done automatically, in list and quotation environments. More flexible control will be added later.

Nested file inclusion (input, include, verbatiminput), is handled, and the comment environment is supported. However, using input to include macro packes is not advisable, although the psbox.tex package is ignored. In later versions, it should be possible to specify files to ignore.

Because of the way LaTeX is parsed, some syntax has to conform to a few simple rules. Macros such as bf and it need to occur immediately after a left brace, and have a block of their own, since the text within their scope is regarded as its argument. This syntax means the same thing as using begin ... end, which is usually a one argument macro (the argument is the text between the begin and end). See Space.

As a Windows hypertext help writer, you don't have access to all RTF commands but you'll be able to get most of what you want. In particular, any LaTeX document you write will automatically be a hypertext document, because the converter takes advantage of the hierarchy of sections. Futher jumps can be placed using the commands label, helpref, helprefn, and popref.

Similarly, HTML support is largely automatic, and multiple files are generated from one LaTeX file since browsing HTML works best with many small files rather than a few large ones.

wxHelp files are least well supported since there is no formatting support, only font style, sizes and colours. Still, some hypertext help support on UNIX/X platforms is better than none. The class library wxWindows may be extended in future to allow using a better help viewer, such as xmosaic. Of course there is nothing to stop xmosaic being used as a help system, but it won't be integrated with wxWindows programs as wxHelp is.

Sometimes you will use a local macro package that is unrecognised by the converters. In this case, you may define a custom macro file where macros are defined in terms of supported LaTeX commands and text. Even if the result is not the same as in LaTeX, you can probably end up with something adequate, and at least avoid undefined macro errors. See Errors for further information.