Big Word Doc with TOC in HTML (Long)

["Lisa Wright" <liwright -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

Dear Collective Wisdom,

As part of delivering doc for a small application written in Access, I
have to make available to the users two things:

1. Help files, maybe 10 topics total, no sweat.

2. A 100-page Word document containing a series of questions and
boilerplate answers that users will copy into a response to a request
for information (RFI). There are ~281 questions and answers. In the Word
version there is a generated TOC. The users must be able to copy text
but leave the source doc intact. I have to have a correctly-numbered
document in Word, up to four levels sometimes. Once I get it into HTML,
I am not concerned about being able to re-number because there won't be
any new content. I just need the numbers to come over.

For the Q&A part I am simply figuring out a delivery method accessible
from the Access application (no writing). I can call HTML or PDF. I have
considered two approaches, and I am looking for suggestions on
simplifying the process. 

First I tried PDF because the distillation process created a linked
TOC--all I had to do was build in "Back to Top" links in the PDF.
However, when I actually copied the text from Acrobat back into Word,
each line has a paragraph return at the end, no matter which paste
method I tried. Back to the drawing board.

Now I am working in HTML--a pasted paragraph is a paragraph, not a
series of them. Thanks to the recent discussions on getting relatively
clean HTML, I am saving as HTML in Word and then importing into
Dreamweaver, where I am:

1. Creating a framed document. I copy the TOC into the left frame for
navigation, Q&A in the right, title frame across the top. (No frames
debates, please.)
2. Creating a named destination in the body for each heading.
3. Linking/targeting each item in the TOC to the corresponding item in
the body.
4. Putting Back to Top links in the body. Not sure how often to do this.
At least every heading, but maybe more.

To make the import to Dreamweaver easier, I am going to break the Word
TOC after I generate it so I don't have so much hyperlink garbage to
clean up. I am having to re-tag everything in Word (did I mention it's
ALL in Normal except the headings???). I am creating what will amount to
really ugly numbered lists in Word (again, up to four levels) with no
indenting because it creates more Word garbage. But they should be nice
and neat in HTML. I have a CSS and all I need is the numbers to come
over.

I've also considered playing with iframes for the body text, but I don't
know if they're really appropriate for such a large amount of text (~400
KB file) and the documentation I have on iframes is a bit sketchy.

Am I on the right track, making it too hard? Missing anything obvious? 

Thanks a bunch!

Lisa Wright



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