Hi there,
I’d like to solve an annoying issue when my customers send to me text formatted in a word Pc document. I’d like to maintain the dimensions and formatting. Usually we work with cross platform font as arial, but every tine I insert the text in rapidweaver is very complicated to set it similar to the .doc text.
Any helps ? Stacks or Tex editor to use together with customers …?
Thanks.
It’s really not a RapidWeaver issue but more a .docx(or any formatted text file) to .html problem.
HTML by design is cross-platform and device-independent. Modern HTML5 uses CSS3 to do all the dimensions and formatting of the document. Word processing documents have fixed sizes, and historical are designed for print. So maintaining the dimensions wouldn’t work.
Your best option would be to use MarkDown, all though it’s challenging to get users on board with getting away from their favorite word processor. And try explaining to them that formatting and dimensions are the web developers job never seem to work.
Thanks, Doug, that’s was one of my first ideas but it will be very tough to impose this to my customers …
Hi @beepweaver,
If you’d like to cleanup all that formatting that the docx has, and just work with the text, which you can add markup as @teefers mentioned, or drop the clean text into a stack, then you can try opening the file with the TextEdit app that comes with the macOS. TextEdit will open the file with most if not all the formatting from the docx file. Then from the menu, click on format and select Make Plain Text. This will remove all the formatting and leave you with just the text.
Ricardo
Not sure how often you’re receiving the text and to what degree it’s being integrated into the sites you have presumably created (and maintain). I would consider using a cms (I love @joeworkman total cms…but plenty of others abound). Then a customer could enter the text and format it as they wish. Total cms, and I’m sure others, have awesome rich text formatting options and interfaces. You could create a great admin interface that could look very similar to a familiar word processing environment. And you would still have easy access to the raw text files if needed via the cms server directories.
If you want a cross-platform editor then markdown is the way to go.
Several CMS products use Markdown: so whether you are doing the text or someone else, they’d need to conform to that standard. Thankfully it’s quite easy to do. I love Alloy, but as mentioned there are seveal other good CMS options around.
An intermediate solution is to copy/paste (on your end) as plain text. There’s a very nice menu-app called Paste Plain Text that will do most of the heavy lifting for you in converting from Word to Plain Text. It’s on the app store and is very inexpensive. Of course it is plain text so formatting is not maintained (that’s good for most things, but you also lose bold, italic). I have no idea what you mean by dimensions so I can’t address that.
The easiest way to strip out the formatting is to copy the text and then paste it with ctrl-alt-shift-V. I agree with @teefers that Markdown is good and I would recommend creating sites with Big White Duck’s Scribe stacks. If you’re using Foundation 6, the default text stack is Markdown-based.
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