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Lz0

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 20, 2002
177
4
Melbourne
Anybody know of a good utility to convert Word DOCs to HTML without all the fixups needed when you do it in word. I have a number of different DOCs to do and just don't want to spend the time.
 
tomatobush said:
Just save your .doc document as an .html file. It works great. I do it all the time.

HTML pages created by Word tend to be problematic - they don't always display correctly on browsers other than Internet Explorer; some characters aren't converted correctly (such as "smart quotes"); etc.
 
Westside guy said:
HTML pages created by Word tend to be problematic - they don't always display correctly on browsers other than Internet Explorer; some characters aren't converted correctly (such as "smart quotes"); etc.

I agree, I just created a simple page in Word (something I hope to never to again), and then an equivalent, validating page in a text editor. The Word version was 35% bigger, and was plagued with errors and useless code. Some examples:

Code:
<B></B>
...
<B><FONT SIZE=5></B></FONT>
...
<B><P>Body</B>
 
Use word to save file as webpage

then open up dreamweaver and open up the webpage you just saved then go under commands and hit clean up word html

it turns a piece of **** 3000 code 'webpage' of mine and made it 80 lines

I hate word

but this is by far the best way to clean up word html
 
encro said:
As a side note: Smart quotes are considered a bad thing in html. They do look good though

There's another problem with Word, at least from a Web perspective - it converts regular quotes to smart quotes by default. ;)

Here's a fairly common problem I run into: I have a large number of faculty, staff, and students of varying knowledge level when it comes to the Web. They'll come to me (since I'm the Web dude for the department) and ask "why isn't this page I made displaying correctly?", and they don't want to accept that the basic problem is that they used Word to create it.

Thing is, another MS tool - FrontPage - does a fairly good job of putting together basic Web pages; at least once you set it for compatibility with all browsers. So I'm not sure why Word is so screwy about it.
 
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