Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Isn't Atlantis supposed to output cleaner code than MS Word?
Word creates a disastrous soup of ms-&%@#! tags which do nothing and make it really hard to edit.
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{sigh}.
Word only creates a disastrous soup of ms-&%@#! tags when used by a typist who doesn't know how to actually use Word. When used properly--which takes all of 30 minutes to learn how to do with a simple online tutorial--what Word outputs is exceedingly clean and simple. It can be easily regexed into matching style names in an existing CSS sheet, OR, you can create your own named styles to already match your CSS sheet.
I'm the first to say that when you get someone who's typed a manuscript in an
ad hoc manner, using Word like a typewriter, you get garbage. But that simply adheres to the old saw, "GIGO." That certainly isn't Word's "fault." If someone bothers to learn to use the Styles, Word can output a perfectly clean and usable HTML file that doesn't have a boatload of cruft. OR, if the bookmaker simply cleans the Word file first, which can be done in minutes, the boatload of cruft is eliminated.
Word tries to do a lot of the "heavy lifting" for people who can't be bothered to learn to use it. (Ditto Pages--you get cruft-heavy output on the backend, because it tries to do all the thinking for users who just want to "sit down and type."). What it outputs isn't one iota messier or cleaner than any other WP, not really. People who use WordPerfect, for example, almost always have cleaner ms's because, by nature, they look for opening/closing tags and are aware of what's going on behind the scenes. AWP doesn't make all those "oh, this is what you want" decisions for unskilled users, so again--you don't get that behind-the-scenes cruft.
I'm no apologist for MS, but don't blame Word for the users who use it, and how they use it. I'm constantly gobsmacked by how many writers simply can't be bothered to learn how to actually
use their own tools properly, even when it would save them hours of work in the future. When used even
remotely correctly, Word outputs perfectly clean HTML. AND has a feature set that would save authors tens of hours of work--if they learned how to use Outline View, Document Map, etc.
Hitch