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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?"
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.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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.
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?
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
..."Intern"
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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;
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
Jesus, tell me about it. I get 30kb attachments merely saying "Got your email, thanks!" with "thanks" done up in some odd curly red font and a six-line sig, not to mention the twenty-seven 8x10 colored glossy JPG attachments with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one...
You think that's bad?
I was given 61 screenshots (blithely dubbed "program requirements"), each its own Word document. Each containing only a (weirdly scaled) picture, of course.
61 Word documents.
The Internet is full. Go away.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz