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Subject:Re: Single sourcing Word and HTML From:"Ridder, Fred" <F -dot- Ridder -at- DIALOGIC -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 4 Mar 1998 09:20:07 -0500
Kylie,
I have produced excellent results using HTML Transit from InfoAccess.
This tool uses a "conversion template" which maps Word styles to
"conversion elements" that have specific HTML tags and elements
associated with them. You can also map HTML page splits to specific
paragraph styles (e.g. Heading 1 and Heading 2), and Transit will
automatically generate hypertext links for all cross-references and
bookmarks in the Word file.
If your writers have consistently used a small set of Word templates
and/or stylesheets, this approach should be pretty painless. If there
are a lot of different Word templates in use, or if your writers use a
lot of locally-formatted Normal paragraphs, the need to create/tweak
a lot of conversion templates may not be practical.
Fully functional demo versions of HTML Transit 2.0x and 3.0 are
available at http://www.infoaccess.com . If you are using Word97,
you'll need to use the 3.0 version. Otherwise, you may prefer the
older version of HTML Transit, which generates "cleaner" HTML
(by default, the 3.0 version adds explicit FONT FACE and FONT
SIZE tags to each and every paragraph) and handles certain features
better than the newer version, IMO.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kylie Bansemer [SMTP:kylie -at- QITS -dot- NET -dot- AU]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 1998 12:56 AM
> Subject: Single sourcing Word and HTML
>
> I am contracting with a company which makes extensive use of procedure
> or business systems documentation. Currently, this documentation is
> written in Word and printed. The Word documents don't use any nifty
> features like bookmarks, either. Just styles and plain old text.
> However, in the past couple of months I have seen a definite push by
> developers to get the information on-line, as HTML documents.
>
> We still need the Word documents. Most of the managers here are not
> familiar with HTML, and have no wish to learn it, so they will still
> need to edit the Word source. The documents will also still need to
> be
> printed to show to visitors, such as clients, other department
> personnel, etc.
>
> As far as I can tell, our options are:
>
> - to use Word's Save As HTML feature. However, the HTML created is
> unattractive and pretty darn useless.
>
> - to create some custom macros to do our own Save As HTML, which will
> convert styles as needed, save sections in the document as separate
> pages, insert links, etc. But this will require a fair amount of time
> to implement.
>
> - to forget about single sourcing and maintain two sets of documents.
> This will also take some time to implement and maintain.
>
>
> So, my question is, what to do? Are there third-party applications
> out
> there that will do this? Have other companies tried to implement
> something like this? Are there any other options?
>
> Any insights, experience, tips, examples appreciated.
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Kylie Bansemer
> Click Computing
> ...Mailto:click -at- qits -dot- net -dot- au
> ...http://www.hypermart.net/click
> ---------------------------------------
