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Posted by SpaceGirl on 12/25/49 11:26
Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Roy Schestowitz wrote (seen on alt.html):
>
> [...]
>
>> * Fragment the output as requires, probably by hand (WYSIWYG programs
>>like Word have no notion of structure or semantics)
>
>
> This isn't by any means aimed at you personally, but your posting
> triggered a response from me, and it looks as if knowledge is proceeding
> backwards.
>
> Proper use of MS Word uses Styles, oriented towards the structure of the
> document. (If I had my way, I'd rip the direct styling buttons out of the
> main menu of Word, and hide them away in an Advanced Users menu). Such
> properly-made Word documents are reasonably capable of being converted
> well to structural HTML, and a stylesheet suitable for web use can then be
> applied (it usually won't be the same "style sheet" (= style template) as
> would be suitable for a printed Word document, of course!).
>
> I had some experience, around 1997-8, with the (payware) rtftohtml program
> - subsequently renamed and marketed under the company name Logictran - it
> had this pretty-much sorted out. I must admit I haven't got experience of
> it since the change of name, but I can say that the principles of the
> original program seemed to what I was looking for, unlike most of the
> other pseudo-WYSIWYG garbage from other places (that offended all sense of
> what is suitable for the WWW).
>
> With that rtftohtml program, decently structured Word could be turned into
> decently structured HTML, and split on chapter or section headings quite
> automatically, with HTML indexes and table of contents generated
> automatically. OK, there were some rough edges, but at least the
> principles showed up just fine. I find it sad that some 7 years later we
> seem to have fallen back to the stone age of direct styling and
> pseudo-WYSIWYG in most of the Word conversions that I have seen.
>
> [Note - there are other programs called rtftohtml or rtf2html - it may be
> that some of them do a similar job, I can't speak for or against them,
> I'm just commenting as a reasonably satistfied user of version 4 of this
> particular program from around 1998 onwards.]
Word XP and upwards stores its documents in XML format doesn't it? You
could probably write your own XSLT to turn in into HTML fairly easily.
--
x theSpaceGirl (miranda)
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