A Python package for easily generating pretty webpages, also including a MATLAB toolbox.

make_webpage(pagecell, '/path/to/output/directory/andmaybefilealso.html', params);

with pagecell a 1-d or 2-d cell holdings objects as defined below, and params being a struct, which accept the following parameters: params.copy_images: 0 or 1 depending on if you want the script to copy the images to a subdir of your webpage. params.title: the page title params.description: the page description params.paged: the number of items per page (do not specify it if you want a single page) params.header_lines: the number of lines from the top of the cell to replicate for each page produced by automatic pagination

cat fileslist | ./clitohtml.py /path/to/output/directory/andmaybefilealso.html

The fileslist file is a text file which is parsed as a table : lines are rows, and space/tab separated chunks are columns. The clitohtml.py script takes some options, such as -c which enables the copy of images to the target directory.

• Images, as either MATLAB matrices or on-disk paths
• Thumbnails & lightbox popups for images, or as galleries
• Videos, as on-disk paths
• Text
• Heatmaps
• Comment fields (interactive)
• Line plots
• Subpages
• Stacks
• Tables

• Subpages (again)
• Automatic pagination

• ???

Either just a standard MATLAB string or a struct with .type = 'text' an .text = 'yourstring'

Either just a path (or possibly just a matrix for images), or make a struct with .type = 'image' (or 'video') and .url = 'on_disk_path_to_image'

If you want to display a matrix in your code as an image and want to specify additional parameters make a struct with .type = 'image' and use the .data field instead of the .url one. The image will be saved to disk with reasonable settings and everything else will be transparent.

Currently only .mp4 and .webm video should correctly work. Might require some browser-specific tricks.

You can specify the width and height at which the image or video should be displayed by using the .width and .height fields. If you only specify one of them, the toolbox will try to preserve the original aspect ratio.

Set the .popup field to something (1 is good enough) to have the image being displayed as a thumbnail (which will be produced at the size specified by .width/.height (same as for images/videos)) and a lightbox with the full resolution image come up when you click on it.

As for thumbnails and lightbox popus, set the .popup field to 'gallery'. You can specify a title to display through the .title field. All images will be displayed in a single gallery per page, which can be browsed by left/right arrows or visual buttons.

Just a struct with .type = 'comment'. Note that this service is using an external server running a tiny Django app which serves these comments, server which might go AWOL at any time with your comments.

Struct with .type = 'plot', .xdata = 1d or 2d matrix of values (2d if multiple plots), same for .ydata

Struct with .type = 'xkcdplot', .xdata = 1d or 2d matrix of values (2d if multiple plots), same for .ydata. You can specify .minx, .maxx, .miny, .maxy, .xlabel, .ylabel, .title fields (min/max* handle the axis limits, the other are the axis labels and plot title). You can also specify curves colors through .colors = a cell array of colors (one per curve).

Struct with .type = 'heatmap', .data = yourdatamatrix. Produces a nice colored heatmap with value-at-cursor-position tooltips. You can specify a custom colormap by putting a cell of strings in .colormap field. The default colormap is not the usual rainbow colormap, but rather one from [1].

Just put a cell into a 2d cell (putting a cell into a 1d cell will lead to a 2d table page), which will make a "Subpage" link in the current page, or put your subpage cell as a .subpage field of another object, on which the link to the subpage will be added. If you use the latter, you can also specify the .subpage_title and .subpage_description fields. If you want to make a text link, make your item as before plus with .type = 'text' and .text = 'the-link-text' (as for a simple text object).

A stack of items on top of each other, with a set of tabs to switch between items. Define it as a struct with .type = 'stack', .stack = cellofitems and .labels = cellofstrings

A simple table. Define it as a struct with .type = 'table', .header = cellofitems, .rows = cellofcellofitems. Tables are really minipages instead pages.

See the params.paged and params.header_lines parameters described at the top of the page. The same parameters are also accepted through --paged and --header_lines CLI options.

There are two parts : the python layer and the templating layer. If you do not need any pre-processing and can render your item with just HTML, CSS and JavaScript, skip the python part.

webpagemaker/item.py defines the dictionnary item_processors. To add preprocessing to your item type, just add an extra "itemtype": your_item_processor mapping to this dictionnary, where your_item_processor is your preprocessing function, which will have to take two parameters, the item and the global software parameters (including thing like the target directory, so that you can save extra static files to this place), and returns the processed item. Items are handled as directories in Python, and Matlab matrices as nested lists (i.e. for 2d matrices you'll have a list of list). Please look at the plot and heatmap processors if you're still wondering what you can do.

As JSON is the standard for exchanging data with JavaSript, and as it is a very convenient format for storing things such as matrices, I added a small PHP script to serve gzipped json files if the browser supports it. That means that you can output json files in params["target_dir"]/json plus their gzipped version (with an extra .gz extension), and use static/php/servejson.php?json=YOURFILE.json as your json file URL.

Please note that if you have more control on your webserver than I do, you can achieve just the same thing without any PHP by using the Apache (or equivalent) DEFLATE module and add application/json to the supported mime types that can be compressed. The only difference is that in my script case, compression is already done while Apache module would have to compress on the fly.

make_webpage uses the powerful, Django-inspired, Jinja2 templating engine for rendering webpages. This way logic and data processing is almost completely decoupled from layout/presentation.

Handling a new item type is just a matter of extendif the if/else switch in templates/item_type_switch.html, possibly adding a new template as templates/item_YOURTYPE.html.

If you need to add some javascript, you can put static javascript files in static/js/ and reference them at the bottom of templates/webpage.html. To include it only if there is one item of the given type, you can use a {% if types.YOURTYPE %}{% endif block %}, and to include item-specific JS code, extend templates/script_type_switch.html as for HTML sources.

A common issue with this architecture is that you (mostly) cannot directly place item-specific JS code next to the HTML code, because static js libraries are loaded at the end of the page (for better user experience). Thus we have to iterate twice over the items set, and had to implement some workaround to be able to reference specific HTML tags from dynamically generated JS code.

Each item is given an ID at the template level, which you can access through the {{ itemid }} variable. You can thus give your HTML tag an ID such as id="plotholder{{ itemid }}" and later reference this tag, for instance by using a jQuery selector such as $("#plotholder{{ itemid }}").

Simply add your item CSS to static/css/wswebpage.css, or you can add your own custom CSS stylesheet and include it just as a static javascript file (with {% if types.YOURTYPE %}, etc)

• Jinja2 for templating bits http://jinja.pocoo.org/
• Simplejson for python json handling https://github.com/simplejson/simplejson
• JSONlab for MATLAB json handling http://iso2mesh.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?jsonlab
• Twitter Bootstrap for layout goodness http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
• jQuery for javascript handling http://jquery.com/
• Raphael/gRaphael for plots http://raphaeljs.com/ and http://g.raphaeljs.com/
• JAIL for lazy loading http://www.sebastianoarmelibattana.com/projects/jail
• d3.js for visualizations http://d3js.org/
• Magnific Popup for lightboxes http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/magnific-popup/

[1] "Diverging Color Maps for Scientific Visualization." Kenneth Moreland. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing. December 2009.