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000028_icon-group-sender _Sat Sep 30 21:49:00 1995.msg
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1996-01-03
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sun, 1 Oct 1995 11:57:34 MST
Message-Id: <9509302149.AA04950@ns1.computek.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Length: 2236
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 95 21:49 CDT
From: gep2@computek.net
Subject: HTML/Word Converters
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Cc: bnielsen@logicon.com
X-Mailer: SPRY Mail Version: 04.00.06.17
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
> Is anyone on this list aware of publicly available ICON or SNOBOL4
programs that will convert Microsoft Word 6.0 documents to hypertext
markup language (HTML) files and/or convert the other direction.
I certainly can envision writing programs to help convert existing files from
various formats to HTML, but the real problem here is that HTML is really NOT AT
ALL a page layout language... in the normal version at least, you can't really
control font, point size, where lines start and end, exactly how images and text
interact with each other... as opposed to a desktop publishing system or
high-powered word processor where you can get JUST what you [THINK you] want.
It's hard to drive this point home to people, but I finally got one friend to
get closer to an understanding of the point when he noticed that, under his Web
browser on his Mac at least, simply changing the width of his browser's window
on the screen caused all the text on the Web page he was looking at to be
reformatted and re-laid out...
And of course, the VIEWER gets to control point sizes, font selections, and the
like.
Of course, there IS Adobe Acrobat (for those people who feel they HAVE to
control what the user sees) but I think that's a damned poor idea... part of the
whole idea of a PERSONAL computer is that the VIEWER should be able to control
the way the stuff they're getting looks to them. I wish that information
providers would be content to PROVIDE INFORMATION, along with Web-style
SUGGESTIONS as to the flavor of how it's presented, instead of trying to force
the viewers into some specific straightjacket regarding presentation.
Anyhow, given the fact that probably 90% of the stuff that something like Word
for Windows can do can't possibly be done with most Web browsers, it's pretty
hard to justify using WORD for such documents. A simple text editor is fine
(or, better, a good hypertext HTML editor).
If it's a one-time conversion that someone needs to do, there are all kinds of
ways to get that done. The best choice depends on what the original document(s)
look like, and how much of them there is to be converted to HTML.
Gordon Peterson
http://www.computek.net/public/gep2/