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?"

Comments

Dreamweaver

[necro2607]

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.

Re:Dreamweaver

[fean]

in Dreamweaver, there's a command "Clean up MS Word HTML". Its made to clean up Word's crappy html, and does a pretty nice job of it.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Anonymous Coward]

Also note that you have the ability to cut and paste formatted text from Word into the 'Design View' within dreamweaver and DW will automatically reformat the incoming text appropriately. In my brief test to make sure i wasnt talking out my a** i found it even supports word tables properly.
If you paste text into the Code view, DW removes the formatting completely and just uses the raw text.

Antiword

[alanp]

Try antiword, it's got a real decent HTML option.

Textism

[NoInfo]

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.

Re:Textism

[e**(i pi)-1]

a standalone Perl script, I use daily is demoronizer.

Dreamweaver

[SlashChick]

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!

HTML Tidy

[N8F8]

Save the Word document as filtered HTML and pipe the HTML through HTML Tidy. Nice clean HTML.

no link for you, Slashdot hordes!

[SeanTobin]

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.

Re:no link for you, Slashdot hordes!

[FooAtWFU]

My SSH connection to my server still lives; I think my task was accomplished well enough. :)

Tidy Flags

[N8F8]

Almost forgot. The Tidy Docs will tell you to select "--bare" and "--word-2000" and I also recommend "--output-xhtml" and "--indent".

Re:HTML Export

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Whew- I hoped I didn't have to post this 40 comments down in the thread. Yes, Office 2000 has the above tool- and Office 2002 or 2003 has it on the Save As menu. The option you want is "Web Page (filtered)|*.html". I saw an interview once with somebody on the Word development team, and he claimed that the original Save As HTML was built for passing Word Documents over the web- and never meant to be read by human beings as a web page at all. Web Page (filtered) cuts out all the extra shyte that Save As HTML used to put in for managing version controled updates and changing the font every bloody character- and builds a real web page.

HTML Tidy program

[Todd Knarr]

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.

WordML - FO - XHTML/PDF

[room101]

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!

Net-It is your magical tool

[netringer]

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?

Try this....

[mormop]

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.

Re:Export it as XML and XSLT it to HTML

[Lemuridae]

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.