MS Word "crap" at beginning of html files

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DTM

Yes, that was created under Word 2007. I opened it, saved it "down" to 97-2003 format, and have attached the resulting file. I have not tried it.

Thanks--I'll let you know how it works with my itchy-twitchy file. ;-)

Hitch

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Why does Word put a gazillion font items at the start of html files even when those fonts are not being used in the file? It makes it much harder to edit the files in Sigil or any other editor.

You answered your own question.

Personally, I'm fond of EditPlus for my HTML editing -- and pretty much everything else. It isn't free, but I promote it anyway because it's just so darn good. In any event, though, I'd use just about anything except Word for HTML. As it's been said, Word is as good an HTML editor as Dreamweaver is a word processor.

[Ken Irving]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Is there an easy way to clean up the styling "crap" that Word puts at the top of all html files? Like maybe through a regex search and replace?
...
Anyone have any suggestions?

A chapter in a book called EPUB Straight to the Point, by Elizabeth Castro, gives very specific instructions for turning a Word 2007 doc into an epub file that will pass epubcheck validation. There are quite a few steps, so I can't really summarize it here, but it starts with saving to filtered html, closing, and then reopening and editing the raw file with a text processor. It is a process of moving some things around, changing a few things by hand, and the rest requires search and replace using regular expressions. I recommend this book highly, by the way, which you can get in print or as an ebook with DRM from Amazon or B&N, or directly from her site with no DRM: http://www.elizabethcastro.com/epub/

She's primarily interested in formatting for the iPad, but most of what she says can be applied to any ereader that uses epub because she gets into the nuts and bolts of an epub file and is very good at explaining things.

[KevinH]

Hi,

Although mentioned earlier, an even easier way to make the conversion is to use OpenOffice.org and its free plugin writer2xhtml.oxt. Both are free and cross-platform and work very well.

The work flow then becomes:

1. edit your file in Word until your heart is content, then save it as a Word file.

2. open your Word file in OpenOffice.org (after installing the free plugin) and yes it can read and write Word files. Yes it has dictionaries in many languages not supported by MS. Yes, it can do pretty much whatever Office can do - and it is free (as in free beer) and is GPL licensed as well.

3. Do any other editing you want, then export your document to xhtml via the plugin.

4. Fire up Sigil or Calibre to load/convert the xhtml to epub or whatever you want.

The xhtml is much better formatted than the crap that MS Word produces.

There is even a plugin to take you direct to epub although I am not sure how far along that is.

The nice thing is that if you are unfamiliar with OpenOffice.org, you can do most of your editing in Word and only use OpenOffice.org for the conversion to xhtml if you so desire.

KevinH

[Hitch]

I take the "nuke it" approach; I wipe Word files completely clean; apply a base layer of formatting; output to html; put the html in my much-beloved NoteTab Pro (thank you, thank you, @capidamonte for turning me on to NoteTab!), attach a standardized css that I keep handy, insert various Sigil formatting (like the chapter breaks), regex the chapters to create headers, and then put that fine-tuned html into Sigil. Works GREAT. Best method I've found thus far. I just delete all the crapola that MS puts in the beginning of the html as "styles," most of it is utter garbage. HTH.

Hitch

[edbro]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Although mentioned earlier, an even easier way to make the conversion is to use OpenOffice.org and its free plugin writer2xhtml.oxt.

At your suggestion I've been using OO with this plugin. I have a question about some of the choices though. If I choose to output xhtml using "original style" vs something else, like "chocolate", I get a much larger file size. I notice that original style has a style description in front of every line. However, in practice I've found that the larger sized original seems to give a more efficient epub. When I used "chocoate" the epub was slow on my reader.

So, I guess I'm answering my own question but I want to be sure. Another factor that makes me unsure of all this is that the output file size using "original style" is almost the same as MS Word's Filtered Html output. So, am I achieving anything by using OO?

Also, should I be exporting to xhmtl or xhtml + MathML (which comes up by default)?

[Toxaris]

The main gripe I have with wiping, because that's easy, is that the formatting is gone. I can live with the headers, but I find it for myself unacceptable that things like italics will be removed. Usually the writer puts that in on purpose and it should remain there.

I used to have a good tool to remove all the Word-specific muck, but unfortunately that does not run on Vista and higher...

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

The main gripe I have with wiping, because that's easy, is that the formatting is gone. I can live with the headers, but I find it for myself unacceptable that things like italics will be removed. Usually the writer puts that in on purpose and it should remain there.

I used to have a good tool to remove all the Word-specific muck, but unfortunately that does not run on Vista and higher...

Toxaris: I use the BookDesigner template...it's available somewhere around here on MobileRead, and that works perfectly to preserve italics, fortunately. So I load the template; run the macro to tag the italics; strip the formatting; I apply a base font by modifying the normal font, then re-italicize the text with the built-in macro, save it and export it to html. Any other way simply leads to madness, IMHO...and believe me, I've tried them ALL. OO, Atlantis...I've actually lost track of everything I've tried.

HTH.

Hitch

[Amalthia]

I use Word Perfect and the Publish to Plain HTML option. Then I use macros to remove the span tags and the break tags it adds. But compared to Word it's a cake walk. The rest of the HTML is plain and easy to edit.