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HTML Converters

May 2014 Note: It is still true that saving from MS Word to html is a terrible way to produce HTML documents. Alas almost everything else on the page is in significant need of review and update.

This section needs updating

MS Office

Word conversions need a lot of help; Word saves a very large amount of extraneous information and saved html to make it possible to import these documents back into Word without losing formatting.

Microsoft has developed its own Office 2000 HTML Filter (for Word 2000 only). Rather than "Save As html", one selects "Export To > Compact HTML". In Word 2002 this capability is built-in; "Save as html, filtered"
WebWorks Publisher for Word, this company started out with a FrameMaker to html solution.
SVGMaker converts MS Office products, and Visio, into SVG, the W3C vector graphics format. ($50)
DreamWeaver can remove most of the extraneous markup in Microsoft office products.
It has been suggested that saving Word to RFT, and then converting the RTF to html results in a much cleaner document. We have not tested this, but products such as EasyByte's rtf-2-html support the procedure.

Text

If you are starting with a text file, or an ASCII table, there are perl tools to translate these to html quickly: txt2html and txtbl2html, respectively (perl programs). See course bibliography (Misc) for link to Perl for Windows.

Email

You can translate a series of email messages to linked html documents with mhonarc. Mailing lists can even use mhonarc as a recipient to update the html version of a mailing list on the fly. A few examples include:
the h2oteam-archive (460K)
the NT help archive (185K)
the Sun help archive (147K),
etc.

slide 45

Lab Exercise on Document Conversion

"Mastering a Web Site" online course
Created and maintained by Lorna Schmid and David Boldt.
http://water.usgs.gov/usgs/training/webmaster/converters.html
Last modified: Fri Oct 17 11:27:17 EDT 2003