Formatting help, anyone?

[amanuensis1]

Oof, I've run into a snag, but it only has to do with formatting. Can anyone help me and save what will be a day's worth of work on formatting alone?

I've been composing the document in Word, and I realized late that I needed to do special formatting for this one--some lines centered, some paragraphs left-justified and some with indented margins on both side. So I've made little macros in Word to help me do that faster. Trust me to forget that the mechanisms of Word formatting--those little "set margins to this number" and "click here to center the paragraph" mouse clicks--do NOT translate to html when one tries to cut-and-paste into an html-based engine (such as the Netscape Composer I use to make webpages, or LJ's posting mechanism) later. Arrrrgh.

So does anyone have any suggestions what I might do at this point so I don't have to go through the Netscape Composer document and cut-and-paste "center" and "/center" and "blockquote" and "/blockquote" by hand two thousand times?

ETA: Oh! I think I might have it! I tried saving it as an html document, then revealing the html, THEN I had to paste the document with all the html revealed into the html source version of the Netscape Composer page. Okay, I think this might work! (But if anyone has other suggestions I'll take them.)

Comments

[capri-chan.livejournal.com]

Don't have any tips, because I actually write all my fics in Netscape Composer. I have a default of black background and white text that makes it easier on my eyes.

But I would like to say that this sounds suspiciously like a script. :D

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

HUSH, YOU.

[ook.livejournal.com]

Can't you just save the document as a Web Page in Word? That would drop all the correct formatting into HTML, wouldn't it?

[ook.livejournal.com]

Be sure and change the file name before you try this. :)

[gatewaygirl.livejournal.com]

You don't need to. Word creates a new file with the .HTM extension.

[ook.livejournal.com]

I'm just super-cautious. :)

[gatewaygirl.livejournal.com]

Hm. I save my word files as HTML, remove the MS HTML cruft by running them through a perl script that my husband customized for from a publicly available one called the demoronizer. Of course, that means when I'm going from a site with reasonable HTML support (like fiction alley) to one with really lame HTML support (like the-archive) I need to edit all the files again to remove < p> tags and end lines and things like < DL> tags which I use to indent letters and notes when they're available. I do most of this by pulling the file into emacs and running macros on it there.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

I think I went blind before I reached the end of your first sentence. I am SO ILLITERATE in html, gah.

I think my work-around will work, though. If not I'll come sobbing on your shoulder.

[gatewaygirl.livejournal.com]

Um ... Did I mention I've been working in computers since '88? :-D

If you don't have an aesthetic objection to the unnecessary complexity of the MS HTML conversion, then you are probably better off with your solution!

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

If this deal doesn't work out, then you should be able to go to Tools > Options and someplace in there is View All Characters. Once you can see all the characters, you know what Word is actually putting in there for the indentations and stuff.

Then, you can use global replace to replace whatever the characters are with html like < blockquote > or whatever.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

View All Characters looks woefully flimsy for my needs when it's done. Damn.

[gossymer.livejournal.com]

What I do is copy/paste all the code into Semagic and then use find/replace to change the all the "left" to < blockquote > etc.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Me no have Semagic. :( But thanks anyway!

[florahart]

...okay, there is no reason ever to save anything as an html document in word. It will create you a file that is full of meaningless crap and is in cases with a lot of formatting literally hundreds of times larger (in file size) than there is any reason for it to be, and yeah, usually that's not horrible for text files, still. Also, when you use Word html, it tends to force fonts and point sizes in pixels and do generally Bad Design stuff that make for godawfulness on monitors that are not like the one one which the thing was written, so it's relatively worthwhile to avoid like the plague for anything not intended to be viewed in a very standardized setting.

/opinionated

Does Composer have a "remove the Word HTML" button? Dreamweaver does--it cuts it in about half, anyway; there is SO MUCH of it DW can't keep up with the stupid Microsoft keeps introducing. Heh. It doesn't, however, fix most of the absolute size stuff because it figures well you might have been making a page in which you needed control over absolute sizes in order to manage relative positions on the page.

Just ctrl-h find-and-replace and clicking "more" to use the format and/or special characters won't do what you need? I mean, it'll start your blockquotes, though I don't think I know how to end them. Hm.

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's the "Hm" of that that's stymieing me. I could chuck so much of the html but then I have these unclosed tags, and then I find I've chucked too much, and, oh, everything.

Word Macros

[lapillus]

The lovely and excessively talanted astolat has come up with several very useful MSWord macros for conversion. They can be found here.

Re: Word Macros

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

Annnnnnnd of course it doesn't work for Mac Word X. Sigh.

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