Converting MS Word HTML output into something sane

[Ai Haibara]

It's probably well-known (well, one hopes) that outputting a document to HTML in Microsoft Word adds a ton of additional code to the document, for no sane reason. I've been having to work with HTML pages from a handful of people, recently, and they use Word to create them, so... is there any sort of program/converter that'll take a Word-created HTML file and convert it to a more sensible HTML file, without all of Word's extra formatting in the way?

I saw a program in passing, years ago, that claimed to do something like that - but I didn't have need for it, then, and don't know how well it worked... or certainly, have the bookmark now.

I'm just hopeful there's something out there that can I can just feed the documents to and have it convert, so I don't have to try to filter things out while I'm editing the files. (I can probably find some editor, somewhere, that'll reprocess it before it saves, but...)

[Chris K]

I think this is all about it...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000485.html

Thread may have some links to something useful.

[guns1inger]

I don't know of anything free to clean up Word HTML, but Dreamweaver certainly had a specific import function to do it. Also cleaned up Frontpage code as well.

[lordsmurf]

You're more or less screwed, from what I know. Manual clean-up.

[drjtech]

I've had good results in the past using HTML Tidy. The "bare" and "clean" options are designed to:

This option specifies if Tidy should strip out surplus presentational tags and attributes replacing them by style rules and structural markup as appropriate. It works well on the HTML saved by Microsoft Office products.

http://tidy.sourceforge.net/docs/quickref.html

The last time I had to do this was in the days of Office 2000, so your results may vary.

-drjtech

[AlanHK]

I saw a program in passing, years ago, that claimed to do something like that - but I didn't have need for it, then, and don't know how well it worked... or certainly, have the bookmark now.

Probably Dreamweaver's "Fix Microsoft HTML".

I just love the way MS HTML has pages and pages of style definitions, then when you get to the actual text, it ignores all those and just has lines of nested FONT codes and other braindead stuff.

[thecoalman]

If yoiu look around there's some php scripts for doing this.

[Ai Haibara]

I saw a program in passing, years ago, that claimed to do something like that - but I didn't have need for it, then, and don't know how well it worked... or certainly, have the bookmark now.

Probably Dreamweaver's "Fix Microsoft HTML".

I just love the way MS HTML has pages and pages of style definitions, then when you get to the actual text, it ignores all those and just has lines of nested FONT codes and other braindead stuff.

I remember that it was some sort of standalone program. I just didn't have a need for it at the time, and so, I didn't bother trying it. I did save the site in my bookmarks, though... turned on an old system to dig through the bookmarks, and an older version of this may have been it: http://www.bersoft.com/bwhcu/
Of course, the current version's page also mentions using Dreamweaver to clean up the HTML on the bottom. The reference seems a little dated, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if Word probably even converts every single thing to HTML entities far more than any other program I've used. A single line of text can become a monster paragraph!

If yoiu look around there's some php scripts for doing this.

Yeah, I think I've even seen some perl scripts that begin to approach it, too. But the work's actually not crucial, so I'm just seeing if there's some simple executable I can just throw a handful of the Word HTML files at, and see if it generates something that's less of a headache to edit. If it was crucial/important work, I'd most likely open each file in my editor and manually edit everything (as lordsmurf mentions), just to be sure. Either that, or tell everyone I won't accept any HTML output from Word (and wait for the pitchfork-and-torch-bearing mob to form outside my door).

I think I'll try the above utility and some of the standalone options mentioned in the link Chris K posted, and see what they make of one of the files. drjtech - I'll try HTML Tidy as well, though that codinghorror blog entry doesn't seem to think it'll do the trick, as much.

Thanks, everyone.

[lordsmurf]

I tell people all the time that I won't accept HTML from Word or PageMaker. That's really just tough shit on them. Those are not web creation applications.

[greymalkin]

tell them to send you a text file next time ..it will be easier than trying to wade through the mess! :P

[Ai Haibara]

I tell people all the time that I won't accept HTML from Word or PageMaker. That's really just tough shit on them. Those are not web creation applications.

Hmm... well, I'll think about it. But with my luck, they'll just switch to OpenOffice's Writer... which probably does about the same thing just to maintain feature parity with Word.

tell them to send you a text file next time ..it will be easier than trying to wade through the mess! :P

Sure, make me reconstruct all the formatting.

[AlanHK]

tell them to send you a text file next time ..it will be easier than trying to wade through the mess! :P

Sure, make me reconstruct all the formatting.

Worth a try to open the MS-HTML file in a browser, or Word, and copy and paste it into a real HTML editor. That should produce better code, preserving formatting.
(I think formatted text on the clipboard is basically RTF format.)

[Ai Haibara]

Hmm... that's a thought, too. I'll keep that in mind.