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Sanely Moving from Word to the Web?
FooAtWFU asks: "I have a job for a web site (no link for you, Slashdot hordes!). A lot of it is systems administration and development, but I have to routinely post content which comes from a myriad of other sources. Usually they are from academic users, come in Word format, and ultimately need to be posted in HTML. The problem is that Word has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve to throw off the font, layout, size, and so forth. To achieve any sort of visual consistency on the site these various formatting tags all need to be scrubbed, but even using other office suites with better HTML export (OpenOffice.Org) to do the dirty work, it's often easier to recreate the formatting by hand from a plain-text version than it is to clean up a sea of messy tags. Does anyone have any advice (or magical tools) to help me deal with this sort of tedious cleanup?"
It takes Word file and spits out plain text. It can also do some more tricks.
I would suggest using Macromedia Dreamweaver... it's what we use where I work and essentially all of our content entry involves pasting in content from Word documents supplied by clients. Dreamweaver is pretty good for formatting and working with stylesheets.
Try antiword, it's got a real decent HTML option.
Alanp
Here's a tool I saw linked off of O'Reilly Radar once:
http://textism.com/wordcleaner/
I used it once and it did a pretty decent job at preserving the tables. Yet if they're using anything odd like graphics or it's been incredibly tweaked, it probably won't be 100% perfect.
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If you're using Office 2000, you can find the HTML filter here:
a milyID=209ADBEE-3FBD-482C-83B0-96FB79B74DED&displa ylang=EN
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F
I believe this functionality is built into later versions of Word.
Per the site, this produces simpler HTML with Office-specific tags removed. With that done, you could probably use a PERL script, and you might also try writing some Word macros or COM/VBA scripts that clean up the document from within Word.
Check out Commands -> Clean Up Word HTML in Dreamweaver. it does a nice job of getting rid of extraneous tags. While you're at it, take a look at Commands -> Apply Source Formatting as well. This can be customized to your specifications in the preferences section, and automatically tabs out, adds newlines, and converts tags to lowercase where appropriate in the HTML document. Dreamweaver is the closest thing I know of to a program that "automatically" cleans up Word HTML.
Good luck!
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Save the Word document as filtered HTML and pipe the HTML through HTML Tidy. Nice clean HTML.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Hmmm... sounds like a challenge to me. Let's see what we can dig up.
:)
Step 1: Let's look at his user page
Ahh! He put in a website with his profile. Let's all go and check out http://fennec.homedns.org/
Hmm... looks like a personal page. Not too sure what to make of the comic. Anyway, let's move on to..
Step 2: Let's look at his author page. Some interesting stuff here, including three separate e-mail addresses (which I won't post here. You're welcome
A-ha! There is a link to his employer! It's Economic History Services. And what do you know... there are a significant number of pages (especially under abstracts and book reviews) that seem to come straight out of a word processor, only with extensive cleaning. A quick look at the source reveals something interesting. It's clean. Very clean. We're talking on the level of I-use-vim-for-my-webpage-editor clean. Nice job.
Anyway, it looks like it was done by hand. I'm not saying its not good work (quite to the contrary), but I can see your need for an automated solution.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Why use editplus when you can use Crimson Editor when its free, open source, and has all the capabilities of edit plus, functionality, and then some? (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) The built in macro functionality is really sweet too!
HTML Tidy has a special mode for cleaning up Word's crappy HTML export. HTML Tidy is a free command-line tool that is also embedded in a lot of popular HTML editors.
HTML Tidy:
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/
HTML Kit (great integration with HTML Tidy; it includes HTML Tidy so you can just grab HTML Kit without grabbing HTML Tidy)
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
Countless other editors integrate with HTML Tidy as well. Have fun and good luck!
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Almost forgot. The Tidy Docs will tell you to select "--bare" and "--word-2000" and I also recommend "--output-xhtml" and "--indent".
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Adobe Acrobat PDF conversion preserves look
Many free or cheap printing filters / converters available
P.S. There is a Ruby Port as well.
fckeditor is an in-browser WSYWIG. It has a "Paste from MS Word" button that actually strips out a lot of the unecessary baggage. I don't know how well it handles embedded images or tricky layouts, but for the basic stuff it works well.
The interface is similar to Word - maybe if you're lucky, you could get some of your content producers to use it.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
One program I've had luck with is the HTML Tidy program at http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/. It seems to clean up code (particularly from Word) quite a bit.
Using a modern version of Word, output in WordML (xml format). Use a XSL stylesheet to convert the WordML to FO (formatting objects).
From there, do anything you want, like XHTML or PDF.
Or just go to XHTML from WordML with some stylesheet. XSL is teh cool!
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(they always break you eventually)
Net-It Central is the magical tool you were looking for. With that you can just point it at the file share with the Word Documents (and Excel and Power Point...) on it and see them indexed and cross linked on web pages. It'll update the content as the source docs change.
Oh, you mean non-commercial magical tools?
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
For simplifying documents, I've found HTML::TreeBuilder to be a handy module. Then you just have to write code to simplify HTML (throw away useless tags, merge adjacent tags, etc), rather than worrying about reformatting word docs.
Pagify is a perl script I wrote to do this for another job. It's basically a series of regular expressions that: 1. purges all the proprietary XML gunk from the HTML file you save from Word. 2. chops the file into smaller files wherever a Heading 1 appears 3. attaches endnotes as footnotes to the appropriate pages. It's GPL'd, so go nuts.
Demoroniser is, in the author's own man pages words:
A Perl script which corrects incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications.
You can get it from the link in the same page. I must confess that I've not used it myself (don't use Office/Frontpage) but if it does what it says on the tin it should sort you out.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
1) Open Word
2) Select All -> Copy
3) Open Dreamweaver
4) File -> New Html Doc
5) Paste
6) Commands -> Clean up Word Html
7) Commands -> Apply Source Formatting (if you take the time to set the programs preferences to what you like)
8) Done
9) Drink beer
10) Sleep
Ave Molech Setting
The Demoroniser was nice in its time, but it assumes the output should be 7-bit ASCII, or ISO Latin-1 at best.
The Unmoroniser is an updated version that handles Unicode properly and will do things like convert proprietary Windows-only curly quotes to the appropriate HTML4 entities instead of dropping them back to less accurate, typographically offensive straight quotes. Same with ligatures and other characters that the Demoronizer would munge instead of convert.
http://rheme.net/unmoroniser/
Not quite what I'm looking for. Maybe I should clarify: I want to remove the nonessential formatting, while keep certain niceties (in particular, italics for the names of papers they reference, hyperlinks for footnotes, etc) and convert the rest into something simple and plain with just-the-basics of HTML, so I can then style it to match the other pages on the site. Many of these documents go to collections: encyclopedia articles, book reviews, abstracts of papers. If they don't look consistant, then people do complain. (And my site has enough formatting-consistency issues as it is ;)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
From the AC above:
1) get a copy of Word 2003
2) "save as" an exemplar as XML
3) write an XSLT to render it in a HTML with stylesheets etc as appropriate to your website
4) for every document you get, "save as" XML with the XSLT from 3) as the transformation.
5) publish
I've been wondering how long until using XSLT and XML was suggested. XML is supposed to be a common data transport format but most of the other comments talk about starting with tranformations to Word HTML. This is wrong because it assumes that the Word to HTML conversion will produce usable HTML in the first place which is a bad assumption.
The solution suggested by the AC could be combined into a program that drives the entire process using the Word COM API to save to XML and then then, for example, the MS Jet XSLT COM object model to automate the XML conversion. This could easily be maintained (eg: new Word formatting not previously encountered) with small changes to the XSLT.
If the desire is to completely control the output without having control of the input then this is the best way to go. Yes, it's a bit of work but once you have a maintainable turn-key system you will save a lot of futzing with manual formatting. Use the power of XSLT.
One option that can work for some situations is to export / save the file from .doc into .rtf (rich text format) and then use one of the free or pay RTF->HTML converters. I find using other software than Word to convert MSDOC -> RTF produces better results.
Using that process has made preserving italics, bold, and special characters much easier for me and almost seems fully automatable.
I've been using this method recently with some very simple search and replace and able to get good results.
I personally use dreamweaver for coding.. I know, I know, all that gui overhead and only semi-compliant code if it generates it itself.. but it does have the useful clean up word html tool, then I get to working it over in pure code.
works for me anyway..
- paul
Pmp @ DeviantArt
Are you using the telerik radeditor MCMS placeholder? It's free, and has capabilities that let you automatically strip out word formatting. In my experience it only sort of works... but it's better than nothing.
You can also add an event handler for the updating event that does some regex tidying. Replacing the regex "]*>" will go a long way (better double-check that). You should be able to come up with a similar one for all the smarttag nonsense that gets inserted, too.
Still, Word formatting remains a major bane to my existence. Good luck.
HTML Tidy cleans HTML, and has a special function for cleaning Word HTML junk.
It must be terrible to work at Microsoft and always do mediocre work.
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See this site. for PureText.
From the sourceforge page:
I'm using this to convert all of our internal documentation. It does a pretty good job, even converts the images and acts in a relatively reliable manner with 2003, 2000, & 97 formatted files. There's some oddball output sprinkled in, but nothing a little sed fanciness can't fix.