Is there any macro / other tool - free or commercial - that can split
long Word docs into multiple XHTML pages?

Any comments on the quality/effectiveness of suitable products also
welcomed.

__/ [Caversham] on Sunday 11 September 2005 06:02 \__

Is there any macro / other tool - free or commercial - that can split
long Word docs into multiple XHTML pages?

Any comments on the quality/effectiveness of suitable products also
welcomed.

I would advice you to do the following:

* Download Open Office 2 beta (openoffice.org)

* Install it on your Windows machine

* Open the Word document in Open Office

* Save or export as HTML

* Fragment the output as requires, probably by hand (WYSIWYG programs like
Word have no notion of structure or semantics)

* Run HTMLTidy on the resulting HTML (find it in sourceforge.org)

* Modify output to fit XHTML standards

* Use search & replace for the task above

* Lastly, make sure your code validates (W3C validator)

Good luck,

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Slashdot is standard-compliant... in Japan"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 74572E8E
7:40am up 17 days 6:08, 3 users, load average: 2.10, 2.08, 1.85

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Roy Schestowitz wrote (seen on alt.html):

[...]
* Fragment the output as requires, probably by hand (WYSIWYG programs
like Word have no notion of structure or semantics)

This isn't by any means aimed at you personally, but your posting
triggered a response from me, and it looks as if knowledge is proceeding
backwards.

Proper use of MS Word uses Styles, oriented towards the structure of the
document. (If I had my way, I'd rip the direct styling buttons out of the
main menu of Word, and hide them away in an Advanced Users menu). Such
properly-made Word documents are reasonably capable of being converted
well to structural HTML, and a stylesheet suitable for web use can then be
applied (it usually won't be the same "style sheet" (= style template) as
would be suitable for a printed Word document, of course!).

I had some experience, around 1997-8, with the (payware) rtftohtml program
- subsequently renamed and marketed under the company name Logictran - it
had this pretty-much sorted out. I must admit I haven't got experience of
it since the change of name, but I can say that the principles of the
original program seemed to what I was looking for, unlike most of the
other pseudo-WYSIWYG garbage from other places (that offended all sense of
what is suitable for the WWW).

With that rtftohtml program, decently structured Word could be turned into
decently structured HTML, and split on chapter or section headings quite
automatically, with HTML indexes and table of contents generated
automatically. OK, there were some rough edges, but at least the
principles showed up just fine. I find it sad that some 7 years later we
seem to have fallen back to the stone age of direct styling and
pseudo-WYSIWYG in most of the Word conversions that I have seen.

[Note - there are other programs called rtftohtml or rtf2html - it may be
that some of them do a similar job, I can't speak for or against them,
I'm just commenting as a reasonably satistfied user of version 4 of this
particular program from around 1998 onwards.]

Alan J. Flavell wrote:
On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Roy Schestowitz wrote (seen on alt.html):

[...]

* Fragment the output as requires, probably by hand (WYSIWYG programs
like Word have no notion of structure or semantics)


This isn't by any means aimed at you personally, but your posting
triggered a response from me, and it looks as if knowledge is proceeding
backwards.

Proper use of MS Word uses Styles, oriented towards the structure of the
document. (If I had my way, I'd rip the direct styling buttons out of the
main menu of Word, and hide them away in an Advanced Users menu). Such
properly-made Word documents are reasonably capable of being converted
well to structural HTML, and a stylesheet suitable for web use can then be
applied (it usually won't be the same "style sheet" (= style template) as
would be suitable for a printed Word document, of course!).

I had some experience, around 1997-8, with the (payware) rtftohtml program
- subsequently renamed and marketed under the company name Logictran - it
had this pretty-much sorted out. I must admit I haven't got experience of
it since the change of name, but I can say that the principles of the
original program seemed to what I was looking for, unlike most of the
other pseudo-WYSIWYG garbage from other places (that offended all sense of
what is suitable for the WWW).

With that rtftohtml program, decently structured Word could be turned into
decently structured HTML, and split on chapter or section headings quite
automatically, with HTML indexes and table of contents generated
automatically. OK, there were some rough edges, but at least the
principles showed up just fine. I find it sad that some 7 years later we
seem to have fallen back to the stone age of direct styling and
pseudo-WYSIWYG in most of the Word conversions that I have seen.

[Note - there are other programs called rtftohtml or rtf2html - it may be
that some of them do a similar job, I can't speak for or against them,
I'm just commenting as a reasonably satistfied user of version 4 of this
particular program from around 1998 onwards.]

Word XP and upwards stores its documents in XML format doesn't it? You
could probably write your own XSLT to turn in into HTML fairly easily.

--


x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

# lead designer @ http://www.dhnewmedia.com #
# remove NO SPAM to email, or use form on website #
# this post (c) Miranda Thomas 2005
# explicitly no permission given to Forum4Designers
# to duplicate this post.

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, SpaceGirl wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

[comprehensive quote of my posting, without apparently having anything
relevant to say about it.]

Word XP and upwards stores its documents in XML format doesn't it?

So what? XML is only a format for defining markup. If the markup
doesn't do anything meaningful (specifically - if it only creates a
visual result on a printed page, without having any significant
structure) then it's not going to turn into effective HTML: it'd just
be the usual garbage in / garbage out that we're accustomed to with
Word conversions to soi-disant "web" format.

You could probably write your own XSLT to turn in into HTML fairly
easily.

There seems to be some kind of conceptual disconnect here. Most Word
documents (in my experience) simply don't contain the necessary
structure for useful conversion to HTML: they've been created as a
purely visual construction for printing onto paper. It's irrelevant
what underlying technology you use (RTF, XML, SGML, whatever) - the
problem is that the source material simply does not represent the
needed structures, *because the document authors do not put it there*.

You might as well try to convert cheese into fresh cream: both are
fine milk products, it's true, but instead of trying to convert the
one into the other, you'd do better to produce them both starting from
fresh milk. And the kind of "fresh milk" that's needed here is
logically structured text markup. Not visual formatting. Until the
authors of Word documents can grasp that, the prospects for conversion
of Word to web formats are poor, IMHO.

__/ [Alan J. Flavell] on Sunday 11 September 2005 11:19 \__

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, SpaceGirl wrote:

Alan J. Flavell wrote:

[comprehensive quote of my posting, without apparently having anything
relevant to say about it.]

Word XP and upwards stores its documents in XML format doesn't it?

So what? XML is only a format for defining markup. If the markup
doesn't do anything meaningful (specifically - if it only creates a
visual result on a printed page, without having any significant
structure) then it's not going to turn into effective HTML: it'd just
be the usual garbage in / garbage out that we're accustomed to with
Word conversions to soi-disant "web" format.

You could probably write your own XSLT to turn in into HTML fairly
easily.

There seems to be some kind of conceptual disconnect here. Most Word
documents (in my experience) simply don't contain the necessary
structure for useful conversion to HTML: they've been created as a
purely visual construction for printing onto paper. It's irrelevant
what underlying technology you use (RTF, XML, SGML, whatever) - the
problem is that the source material simply does not represent the
needed structures, *because the document authors do not put it there*.

You might as well try to convert cheese into fresh cream: both are
fine milk products, it's true, but instead of trying to convert the
one into the other, you'd do better to produce them both starting from
fresh milk. And the kind of "fresh milk" that's needed here is
logically structured text markup. Not visual formatting. Until the
authors of Word documents can grasp that, the prospects for conversion
of Word to web formats are poor, IMHO.

I fully agree with you on that point. Any attempt at rephrasing the same
ideas would result in depletion. To suggest ways forward, I suggest that
the OP, who clearly wants to publish material on the Web, learns LaTeX.
Shall the idea of editing raw text become daunting, I suggest LyX lyx.org
[LyX: Front-end to LaTeX]. 5 minutes with LyX would help anyone realise
the difference and convey the idea, e.g. varying outputs, styles,
imposition of structure, etc.

Only a few days ago, somebody in the LyX mailing lists mentioned his
upcoming presentation on "Word: What you See Is What a Mess". The
presentation I deliver on Wednesday is well-formed XHTML
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archiv...blic-speaking/ and is
motored by Eric Meyer's S5.

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Software sucks. Open Source sucks less."
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 74572E8E
1:45pm up 17 days 12:13, 3 users, load average: 0.51, 0.58, 0.70

Hi,

Tempore 12:19:53, die Sunday 11 September 2005 AD, hinc in foribus {microsoft.public.word.vba.general,microsoft.publi c.word.docmanagement,alt.html,comp.text.xml} scripsit Alan J. Flavell :

Word XP and upwards stores its documents in XML format doesn't it?

So what? XML is only a format for defining markup. If the markup
doesn't do anything meaningful (specifically - if it only creates a
visual result on a printed page, without having any significant
structure) then it's not going to turn into effective HTML: it'd just
be the usual garbage in / garbage out that we're accustomed to with
Word conversions to soi-disant "web" format.

You could probably write your own XSLT to turn in into HTML fairly
easily.

There seems to be some kind of conceptual disconnect here. Most Word
documents (in my experience) simply don't contain the necessary
structure for useful conversion to HTML: they've been created as a
purely visual construction for printing onto paper. It's irrelevant
what underlying technology you use (RTF, XML, SGML, whatever) - the
problem is that the source material simply does not represent the
needed structures, *because the document authors do not put it there*.

You might as well try to convert cheese into fresh cream: both are
fine milk products, it's true, but instead of trying to convert the
one into the other, you'd do better to produce them both starting from
fresh milk. And the kind of "fresh milk" that's needed here is
logically structured text markup. Not visual formatting. Until the
authors of Word documents can grasp that, the prospects for conversion
of Word to web formats are poor, IMHO.

I warmheartedly applaud your brilliant analysis. You stated your point very clearly.

It's depressing to see what a tiny percentage of people realize (or bother with) the importance of structural markup.

The future does not look bright. I have seen so called 'IT-classes' where they make innocent people believe they are IT-experts when they can change the background color of characters typed in Word...

regards,
--
Joris Gillis (http://users.telenet.be/root-jg/me.html)
Spread the wiki (http://www.wikipedia.org)

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Roy Schestowitz wrote:

To suggest ways forward, I suggest that
the OP, who clearly wants to publish material on the Web, learns LaTeX.

Well, this drifts somewhat off the topic of some of the crossposted
groups, but our physicists are accustomed to writing their
publications in some form of latex, and I can say that when I was
handling the web-ifying of their publications, several years back, I
was (for the most part) getting good results from a program called
latex2html, and most problems were attributable to identifiable
causes, none of which were usually a major hindrance. (Back then we
had to make do with the deplorable HMTL version called HTML/3.2, but,
aside from that, the principles seemed right).

Shall the idea of editing raw text become daunting, I suggest LyX
lyx.org [LyX: Front-end to LaTeX]. 5 minutes with LyX would help
anyone realise the difference and convey the idea, e.g. varying
outputs, styles, imposition of structure, etc.

Only a few days ago, somebody in the LyX mailing lists mentioned his
upcoming presentation on "Word: What you See Is What a Mess".

googled!

It's really the principles which count he but in practical terms,
I'm sure you're right in aiming at a format which promotes doing the
right thing by default - as opposed to one which has prominent
direct-formatting buttons on its user interface, and logical markup as
an apparently advanced topic which, I'm afraid, too many of authors
seem to disdain learning.

all the best

maybe a tad of topic

several years ago i used a tool called doc2help which turned properly
formatted word documents into online help in either html of chm format. in
the process the word document was converted to rtf and the desired html
fragments.

i am now facing the need of having a tool to do a word split up based on the
headings. But have to save it as word, pdf or rtf to have it incorporated in
our DMS.
doc2help unfortunately does not longer exist, though products like robohelp
(now macromedia) worked in a identical way recognizing the styles and
building a document accordingly.

Its a bit identical as a problem. If you find something keep me posted.