[Sigia-l] Word HTML - money were my mouth is (was When Should a Manual be Web-based?)

[Chris Chandler]

"list" (listera's baby brother?) wrote:

> This is fine if you did not care about the headers or the proper bullets
> or outlines being converted over.  We have tried this tools and it still
> needs touching up by hand to reapply the information structure.
>
> I manage a team that deals with this problem on a daily basis.  We have
> clients that develop information documents in MS Word and have finely
> sculpted information for print.  Saving to HTML turns this into an
> information blob that needs somebody to go into the HTML and add the
> proper structures so that the information is properly structured and
> many of the lines of the information sculpture are seen again.  We
> figure between 7 developers that perform this work there are many $100k
> spent that should not need to be spent if Word did the conversion well.


Just out of curiosity -- do your content developers use styles properly when they create a word document? i.e. are all
the top level headings marked as Heading One (etc,) in Word? Or is every style in the document "normal style" with hard
coded formatting?

I recently had to write six functional specifications for related, but slightly different sites. I discovered that the
secret to making Word behave is to use styles, and only styles, when formatting documents. It is for example, the ONLY
way to get word to properly do outline numbering.

see:
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/OutlineNumbering.html

As with most things in our business, it takes a little time to properly set things up, but it makes the production
process much easier. I haven't really experimented with the HTML side yet, but I hope that using styles properly in word
will allow me to use styles properly in my HTML produced from that Word document (maybe this weekend I'll take a stab at
that $80)

As one of the Word MVP's says: "Word is set up to enable the simplest fastest way to produce a document if you have no
idea of what you want or what you are doing."

This quote is from the best resource on using styles I've come across:
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm

-cc