Sent by Jason Kohls on 6 November 2003 03:03
I totally agree with Geoff. I'd love to get our users to stop using Word if
I could but unfortunately, I can't. I find Word has way too many features
in it and needs to have a "lock-down" mode.
We used HTML Transit for years but we had to implement a strict document
authoring/structuring policy throughout our organizations -- heading 1,
heading 2, paragraphs etc. -- to ensure structural integrity of the
documents. Transit actually parses through a Word document, converting it
to HTML of your choice, specified in the HTML Transit template designer. A
bit clumsey of an interface and I don't believe they're in business anymore.
Fortunately, Office 2003 looks promising, with its XML support. I've heard
tales of admins being able to "lock" a document's styles through the use of
XML Schema in the latest version of Word but I'm going to wait and see for
myself. I'm afraid that the binary .doc format will be replaced with
"MS-XML", with all sorts of nastiness embedded in it.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL-REMOVED] [EMAIL-REMOVED]]On
Behalf Of Geoff Bowers
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 8:17 PM
To: [EMAIL-REMOVED]
Subject: Re: [cms-list] Cutting and Pasting from Word?!
Peter Bell wrote:
> I currently use Ektron's EWebEdit as the WYSIWYG editor for my CMS. It's
> not bad most of the time, but it often does a horrible job when users
> cut and paste from Word. My understanding is that all of the ActiveX
> WYSIWYG editors just hook into the same Microsoft code, so their
> capabilities are similar . . . Has anyone ever come across a WYSIWYG
> editor that genuinely does a good job of preserving formatting from
> Word?
Preserving Word formatting is a bit ambitious. It's a bit like saying i
want to preserve exact formatting across all web browsers on all
operating systems. It's just not possible.
All you can hope to do is approximate the formatting. Word has it's own
crack-smoking way of styling up its documents so when you cut and paste
into most Rich Text Editor panes you get a combination of MS specific
inline styles and font tags. If the Word document is *strictly* marked
up with clean heading styles and the like you may get a faithful
representation in HTML *if* you have an appropriate style sheet.
More often than not Word, with the help of its users, whips up a
cocktail of HTML dross. The best you can hope for here is a decent text
editor that can "sweep" or "clean" out all the rubbish HTML -- but with
that may go much of your formatting.
-- geoff bowers
http://farcry.daemon.com.au/
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