Marking Up a Word Document

[tedster]

I get a lot of raw content in Word doument format. Lately I've taken to doing a preliminary HTML mark up while I'm still in Word. That way I can see the author's original ideas for bold, italic, superscript etc. When I'm done, I copy/paste into my page template in Homesite and edit some more for browser appearance and web sensibility.

Marking up directly in Word has it's challenges - for instance, adding extra space when I paste a close tag after the period or question mark, or auto-formatting a lower case tag to upper case.

So here's my question - is there an editor that will still let me see the original visual style of the content, but not do all the funky things the Word does?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Hi Tedster,

I was interested in what you were looking for so I started playing with word. When using the "preview with web browser" button, I noticed all the "funky" things it does!

It seems to put all its irregular markup in CSS? I copied and pasted what I made from Word into FP. P tags were <p class="MsoNormal"> "as is", and no doubt MS Word i good at creating markup you'd never use I imagine :)

Maybe one way would be to copy into your fave editor and use edit/replace for the CSS markup? Looking again at the source, it claims the bloated coad is "XML". Not too familiar with XML, but when you write one sentence in Word, I'm sure it should'nt be there :)

[korkus2000]

I spent a year at a job where that is all I did. I constantly got content in word format and I had to create new pages inside the designers template. These pages where legal content for banks. I had to strictly follow the look in word.

I found the best way to do this is just back and forth from word to homesite. It really is quicker to copy and paste the content then to try and convert or mark up in word. It really made me apprieciate homesite. You can always customize code sweeper to change that rediculous word html, but I never got into that.

[tedster]

korkus, you've described what I currently wrestle with. I don't get into the actual HTML functions in Word (shudder!) but I do want to preserve the look and feel of the author's original layout and emphasis, even though I have the authority to edit as needed for the web.

So what would be ideal would be an editor that displayed rich text, at least to a degree (probably a limited subset of all the features would do it) but didn't impose any auto formatting on the markup I add.

Even when I turn off auto formatting in Word, it still does some "helpful" things that are not at all helpful in this situation.

[oilman]

I've just been fighting with this as well. What I've been doing is printing off the document and sticking it on the wall beside my monitor then cutting and pasting the whole thing from Word into Notepad and marking it up from there using the paper on the wall as a guide.

When I'm feeling exceptionally lazy (which is often) I cut and paste from Word to Notepad then to FP and WYSIWYG my way to freedom.

[tedster]

Sounds to me like there would be a market for a "mark up editor" utility. Think about how many writers create in Word, and how much of that content goes to the web, sooner or later.

After all "HTML" does stand for "Mark-up Language" and not "Create from Scratch Language", which is what most editors are actually designed to do.

Shoot - thinking a bit more about this, it seems it would be simple enough for a utility to do a VERY basic conversion- just add <p></p> and <strong></strong> etc. to match the original rich text.

I'd pay for something like that, this very minute!

[tedster]

The more I thought about this, the more I was sure it had to exist already. Found a page of conversion utilities at w3c [w3.org] I'm going to check out.

[pshea]

You might want to check out a product called Edgar Ease [dtechdirect.com]. It is used by those who file documents with the Securities Exchange Commission. Stock Offerings and the like are created in word processing products, then transformed into HTML or Ascii to meet SEC filing requirements.

[tedster]

Thanks. It looks like that can do the job alright, but at $1500 it's a bit out of my league.

I'm running into that a lot so far - applications designed for intranet Content Management Systems that cost an arm and a leg, and even some with yearly renewal fees. On the other end, I've found some bare bones freeware with no GUI - not my thing either.

I'll keep plugging a way at it.

[Robert Charlton]

tedster - If you find anything, please post it prominently. I've made myself very unpopular with some writer/ collaborators by insisting we stay in ASCII text format.