Custom heading with tex4ht

Question

tex4ht generates a page head and foot with navigation elements, such as [next] [tail] [up] with hyperlinks.

Now I would like to change that appearance to have the page heading left and right of the title:

[prev] My second section [next]

instead of

[prev] [next]

My second section

and (challange!) in the foot:

[prev] My first section <-            -> My third section [next]

where My first section is the name of the previos section and similar with My third section

Answer 1

Your first question is not so hard. Just create dummy sty file, testcrosslink.sty for example, testcrosslink.4ht and put \usepackage{testcrosslink} to your document preamble.

Content of testcrosslink.4ht:

\def\my:nextlink{%
\ifx\nextCut\empty\relax\else[\Link[\nextCut]{}{}Next\EndLink]\fi
}
\def\my:prevlink{%
\ifx\prevCut\empty\relax\else[\Link[\prevCut]{}{}Prev\EndLink]\fi
}

\Configure{section}{\empty}{\empty}{\HCode{<h3>}\my:prevlink}{\my:nextlink\HCode{</h3>}}
\Configure{crosslinks+}{}{}{\empty}{\empty}

This configuration makes top crosslinks empty and redefines section to include links to previous and next file.

To change bottom crosslinks, you can try this:

\Configure{crosslinks}{}{}{ -> \macrofornexttitle [next]}{[prev] \macroforprevtitle <- }{}{}{}{}
\Configure{crosslinks*}{prev}{next}{}

For more information about various configuration options for crosslinks etc., see the CVR's blog

Problem is, I don't know how to automatically retrieve contents of prev and next sections, so how to define macros \macrofornexttitle and \macroforprevtitle must answer someone else. Maybe it could be done using nameref or zref and automatically generated labels, but what I have tried failed.