Re: Problem with Microsoft Word and Tidy

As you may recall,
1) Microsoft Word turns "/" in relative URLs to "\" and many browsers won't 
accept it.
2) Microsoft Word produces very ugly and bloated html that Tidy won't 
convert until the "errors" are fixed.

Most of my colleagues said that they edited raw html. Gosh...editing my 
tables in raw html seems backwards.

I got several suggestions about other editors. I tried:
- Mozilla Composer,
- Nvu (a standalone version of the Mozilla Composer),
- Amaya

I hate to admit it, but all seemed inferior. I know that you get used to an 
editor, but there were two features in Word that I simply can't live without:

1) The paintbrush format copier. I often select something, double-click the 
paintbrush, and blithely start clicking away at all the things I want 
formatted that way. Stylesheets are not a solution since you can't as 
easily get at the underlying representation.

2) Much more important is the ease with which you can edit tables and move 
subparts of the table around in Word. Here's the problem that broke my back 
with the other editors. I have a table with my lecture schedule, dates, 
assignments, readings, etc. It changes a lot. Sometime I need to push just 
lectures and readings back after falling behind. I simply select the 
columns in question (leaving the date and assignments alone), cut them, 
select a cell to which they should be moved, and copy them in. Trivial. No 
way to do that in the others--sub-table copy/paste didn't work for me.

So, what to do? After some more searching, I found Office 2000 HTML Filter 
2.0 at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=209ADBEE-3FBD-482C-83B0-96FB79B74DED&displaylang=EN

After you install it, you edit with Word as you like saving your html files 
files first as .doc versions. Then, you do a file/export to Compact HTML 
and it strips the Word/Office specific stuff out of your document. Then you 
can Tidy it up. Not bad. I could live with that since I was led to believe 
that I could type:
 >tidy -m *.html
but the tidy executable installed by tidy-050522-setup.exe does not accept 
wildcards on my XP operating system.

I suppose it's easy to write a command file in XP to move through the files 
in a directory, but I don't know how; one responder says she does this 
easily on MacOS. Instead, I'll write a keyboard macro using Emacs on my PC 
that moves through a directory and Tidy's up the files.

Thanks for all your suggestions. Do you have a better way?

David Wilczynski

Received on Wednesday, 10 August 2005 00:39:38 UTC