We get lots of questions about using Word to create web pages. Obviously, we don’t recommend this method. Word tries very hard to translate it’s own rich formatting language into a language, HTML, that was never designed to be a formatting language. The resulting file is filled with code that can cause problems when one tries to edit the resulting HTML file.
Here are several examples of files that have been created in Word, then translated into HTML files. To see exactly how Word has translated the file, look at it using View: Page Source:
Original Word document
Word document saved as a Web Page
Word document saved as a filtered web page
Word document, contents copy and pasted into Composer, then saved
Word document, save as filtered web page, then, while still in Word, contents copied and pasted into Composer
When you copy and paste text from Word directly into Moveable Type’s entry area (this area) you lose all formatting except for line breaks.
If you save a Word file as a filtered web page, open it in Composer (a simple HTML editor), and copy and paste the source code into a blog entry, here is the result:
Sample Document
This is a document to see how translations from
Word to
other programs alter this original document.
Here is a paragraph with a first line indent. It
is indented
using the Format: Paragraph: First Line Indent to .25 inches.
Here comes a bulleted list:
- Item one
- Sub-item one
- Sub-item two
- Sub-item three
- Sub-sub-item one
- Sub-sub-item two
- Sub-sub-item two
Here is a table:
|
Cell a1 |
Cell b1 |
Cell c1 |
|
Cell a2 |
Cell b2 |
Cell c2 |
And another table with some interesting formatting
including
different borders, cell width set to content size, and some joined
cells.
|
Three Joined Cells |
||
|
Cell a1: a lengthy bit of text |
Cell b1 |
Cell |
|
Cell a2 |
Cell b2 |
Cell |
|
Cell a3 |
Cell b3 |
Cell |
|
Cell a4: this cell has different borders |
Cell b4 |
Cell |
This paragraph has some italicized text,
some bolded
text, and some underlined text as well as text in several different fonts.
How does the translation handle Styles?
Here are two styles: heading 1, double indent with
a 6 point
space above:
Heading 1
This paragraph has a style applied to it that
indents
the paragraph .5 inches on either side and adds a 6 point space above
the
paragraph.