Posted by Jonah on May 18, 2101 at 07:52:11:
In Reply to: HTML Editor; posted by Mehdi Wolf on May 18, 2101 at 01:11:34:
Hi. First, I'd invite others to weigh in on this. I've used FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Adobe Pagemill, and Word to convert to html. In every case, I found that editing the resulting code afterward took so much time that it was, almost without fail, faster for me to write the initial code by hand and completely ignore converters. But my experience might not be the same as others'.
There is one converter I use frequently, called RTFtoHTML. It might be only for Mac, I'm not sure. Using this, I save a Word document in rtf, convert it using RTFtoHTML, and then edit the resulting html. I find that this converter will take care of the grunt work of adding <i>, <b>, <br>, <center> and -- most especially helpful -- will convert footnotes (if saved as a regular footnote entry in Word) to back-linked end notes. I then go through the resulting html to optimize the code by hand as need be.
But I'm sure that my experience will not the same as others. For example, I use a fully customized Mac, and every time I upgrade to a new computer I export most or all of my customized features, meaning that working by hand with code is very fast for me (I also use the Dvorak keyboard layout, which tripled my typing speed and cut my error rate in half). Others might find one of the graphical editors I listed above more useful.
My only caution is to be careful converting to html using Word. I don't know how customizable the html export feature in Word is, but I do know that the very worst html files I ever receive were converted by Word. The files tend to be inflated with useless code and extremely specific style definitions; in some cases, and I'm not exaggerating, the size was inflated by a factor of 10 or more! I.e., I've received 400K html files produced by Word that I reconverted to .doc and then re-reconverted back into html to produce a file under 40K in size. Not only much smaller, but also more renderable by other browsers.
If anyone wants to test any of these editors, some can be obtained for free. Dreamweaver can be downloaded for a 30-day trial version (which the unscrupulous or the poor can reset to day "1" with a minimum of effort), and Adobe has licensed PageMill for Mac, so I can legally provide it for free to any Mac user. There are also many other graphical editors on the market, many free or shareware, and I'm sure some are every bit as good as the four big-name ones I mention.
Comments? -Jonah