If you think all of the previous steps are too complicated, HTML editors, translators, filters, or WYSIWYG programs do exist which can help you create your HTML files. The HTML editors let you select HTML codes by choosing the result you want from menus. (For example, you can highlight some text and select bold from a menu, and the editor will add in the appropriate HTML codes.) The HTML translators take a document you created in a software package such as FrameMaker or LaTeX on UNIX, or Word for the Macintosh, and add the HTML codes to the document.
WYSIWYG programs such as Adobe PageMill for the Mac and Microsoft FrontPage for Windows allow you to directly edit what is on the screen. You can use menus to add HTML commands, copy and paste images directly from drawing programs, etc.
A macro package for Word for Windows even exists that you can add to Windows and apply to your document (after you've typed it and applied the appropriate styles to it), adding the HTML codes.
Please note that because the availability and versions of these packages change so frequently, this memo can only list the current, existing ones, and provide the WWW addresses of sites that list these packages and link to them. These WWW sites will probably often remain more up-to-date than this document.
The downside to many of these packages is that they cannot do a complete job of taking your document and making it into a finished HTML file. You almost always have to delve into the files by hand and add or correct links, image references, and text features. Still, you may find these packages to be timesavers; you might find a translator that does exactly what you want with the kinds of documents you have. For example, the latex2html translator takes LaTeX documents and turns them into HTML quite well on UNIX, and is a rather robust package.