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

Scrapping

[fembots]

Interestingly, I have a similar job on a website (no link for you too, Slashdot hordes!), here's what I do (I'm sure there are smarter ways):

1. Place all "to-process" documents in a specific folder in a webserver
2. Write a script to read those documents
3. Use Regex (and similar functions) to strip off and/or replace specific tags/wordings (similar to web scrapping technique).

Admittedly it was a tedious job at first to identify every possible template, however I'm amazed how predictable some documents are and once you get hold of such "blueprint", you can reformat documents to HTML/XML fairly easily.

Once the changes are done, I then preview them in a browser, and if everything's expected, I simply save the page and use it; If not, it's easy enough to make a few tweaks from the familar HTML environment.

Sounds like you should release on sourceforge

[arete]

So if there's only a few templates and they were a pain to work out, how about releasing your regex scripts to sourceforge or similar? Or posting here?