I won’t heap any more scorn on MS Word as an HTML generator; the flaws of Word in that regard are fairly well documented.<\/p>\n
If I have a Word document I want to render in HTML, I save the file to a plain-text file, stripping out every<\/i> little formatting quirk, and then build the HTML coding around the plain-text in an HTML editor. (I use two different editors, depending on what I need to do; Arachnophilia, for quickie jobs, Hot Dog Professional, for heavy duty jobs that require tables, forms, that sort of thing.) If it’s a Trek<\/i> story, re-italicizing a ship name isn’t difficult; just do a search-and-replace to put the italics tags around the name of the ship. I don’t do a lot of italicizing outside of that, nor do I do much in the way of boldface or underlining.<\/p>\n
Style sheets. (I said I wasn’t going to heap more scorn on Word; well, I’ve changed my mind.) The one thing Word doesn’t do is style sheets; the layout of a Word HTML document is embodied in the document itself. One of the truly sucky jobs I did a few years ago was to take a very<\/i> large HTML document that had been produced in Word and redo it in a style sheet, because the maintainer of the document wanted to be able to update the document in the future easily. The problem was that the signal-to-noise ratio in the document was extremely<\/i> low–Word puts way too many formatting tags into the document, sometimes in the middle of words–and I spent a week stripping out the document of all the tags, going line by line. Generating a style sheet to handle the formatting took all of about fifteen minutes, and reduced the size of the original document by 70 percent.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a reason I like writing in Word, because it does a lot. But there’s also a reason why I convert my documents over to another format–plain-text or WordPerfect 5.1–if I need to do something else with them. Word produces really bloated documents, when it doesn’t need to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I won’t heap any more scorn on MS Word as an HTML generator; the flaws of Word in that regard are fairly well documented. If I have a Word document I want to render in HTML, I save the file to a plain-text file, stripping out every little formatting quirk, and then build the HTMLContinue reading “On Word and HTML”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[339,117,871],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-computers","tag-html","tag-web-design","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}