Sent by Hilary Marsh on 6 November 2003 05:05
While it seems like no independent text editor does a good job
accepting Word content, several full-fledged CMSs (FatWire,
CommonSpot's PaperThin, Rhythmyx and Red Dot, plus others, I'm sure)
have a "save to" feature from Word that does a better job at
importing formatted text from Word, and according to the hype, will
preserve the styles in just the right way -- changing a user's
Heading 1 style of bright green text in Comic Ital to the styles that
the site's designers set.
--Hilary
At 10:53 PM -0500 11/5/03, Jason Kohls wrote:
>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/
>
>--
>http://cms-list.org/
>please trim your posts.
>
>--
>http://cms-list.org/
>please trim your posts.
--
Hilary Marsh
president, content company inc
plan * create * manage
http://www.contentcompany.biz
(708) 445-3466
download our latest white paper, "Intranets: Inside Worlds," a look
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