Programs for optimising content for SE’s

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Programs for optimising content for SE’s

finding what program people use to optimise text/general content for SE's

Mr_Creosote

3:45 pm on Nov 14, 2002 (gmt 0)

I have had to create large amounts of content for one of our clients. To do this we started with Word XP and then imported into Dreamweaver.

Alas this has caused numerous problems with the excess code Word whacks in for good measure. My question is what program does everyone else use to format text/content for websites.

I know that Dreamweaver has a Clean Up Word Html but this isn’t really good enough for my purposes and DM also has a spell checker but its not up to Word standards.

Textpad?
Notepad?
Wordpad?
Frontpage?
Dreamweaver?
Word?

What do you use?

rogerd

3:59 pm on Nov 14, 2002 (gmt 0)

Hi, Mr_Creosote. I'd say your problem is using Word to create HTML. I don't think you'll ever clean up the Word HTML completely.

If I'm working from Word originals, I usually paste the Word text into DW and do my formatting in DW. This isn't highly automated, of course, but it does make things fairly clean (as clean as DW allows).

If you are creating table structures and the like in Word, you'll probably need to do extensive hand-editing of the HTML it generates.

Terry_Plank

6:23 pm on Nov 14, 2002 (gmt 0)

We like NoteTab Pro.

phollings

7:24 pm on Nov 14, 2002 (gmt 0)

Well, I suppose that different circumstances lead to different optimal solutions. What I do with a user who has weekly page changes is to copy and paste the portion of the webpage that he updates into a Word document. This is just a part of the page -- it doesn't have <head> or <body> tags, so Word doesn't see it as HTML. But, it does contain all the other markup. I turn on Word's "track changes" feature (which color codes any changes he makes to the document) and then save it to a public directory on our LAN. Then, when the Word document has been updated, I open it up look at the changes, patch up the adjacent HTML, do an "accept changes" (to turnoff the color coding & deleted text) and copy/paste it into my HTML document. This works well for us because the styling decisions have already been made and reflected in the HTML. I'm just trying to keep them from getting screwed up by a non-HTML-literate user who has frequent updates.

Your problem is a little different, because you're attempting to capture the styling/layout along with the text IN WORD. Here are three options that might help if the content and layout has to be done in Word:

1) a cleanup program like HTML-Tidy. This is freeware from the w3c and is useful as a syntax checker. It also tries to fix malformed HTML.
2) a second option would be OpenOffice. Again, this is freeware (available under GPL) and replicates most of the functionality of MS Office. The interface is similar enough to Word's that actually creating the documents in OO is an option. If not, OO can import Word. Its native file format is XML. I've actually used OO to convert things like a page with Word's WordArt to HTML -- this is something that Word itself cannot convert using its "save as HTML" feature.
3) finally, Macromedia has a new product called Contribute, I believe, that is designed to allow end users to update HTML pages with Word and other source documents.

HTH,

:) Peter Hollings

Mr_Creosote

9:20 am on Nov 15, 2002 (gmt 0)

hi guys,

thanks for all your posts its very interesting hearing how other people have approached this issue.

Thanks for all your advice,

Mr C

creative craig

9:25 am on Nov 15, 2002 (gmt 0)

This is what I done the other day:

I use notepad, so I made the page as normal, then because of my poor spelling I copied and pasted into word to spell check. Then used HTML-Tidy.

Bit of a long way around, but I was happy bunny ;)

Craig

phushionworx

11:03 am on Nov 20, 2002 (gmt 0)

Well im a bit like craig but i use HTMLPad 2000 for the fact that it hightlights tags for me, the use of shortcut keys allows for insertion of objects, code and such at the press of a button or two, has its own tidy options, stores scripts and snippets in the program for you (Hmmm gee, sounds like im advertising it :))) and supposedly plugins are available but in all honsty i havent seen them, i would use DW but thats just to much macromedia for me when i already use Flash and Fireworks alot of the time. Stick to writing the pages your self in something like HTMLPad, TopStyle, HTMLKit or Notepad (I've seen NoteTab which is quite spiffing to), yea anyway, dont use Word for your documents, and if your playing with someone elses then copy them over to a different editing app and remove the blubber code your self, you'll feel better after it.