HTML or Word Problems

HTML or Word Problems

by Will Muenchow -
Number of replies: 6

Hey Everyone!

Can't get this stuff to work! I have 16 lessons that are all in word format. Each lesson is between 1 and 10 pages. Now bare in mind, each of these lessons is in WORD format. The format has regular texting and also tables. Now, if i simply copy the word file to a resource (html one) and paste it. When I click save and view it, its completley messed up! Not only that, but it only shows 1/5 of what I pasted. When I go back to look at it, only the 1/5 is there! What happen to the other stuff? Now, I also saved the word file to HTML. I then went and got Microsofts filter html tool that takes out all of their garble out of the HTML. Did the SAME thing. Copied and pasted and saved. This time even worse! Again, not all of it showed up and what did looked really bad! Any idea what this guy can do? PLEASE?!?!?!??!!?!?!?!

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In reply to Will Muenchow

Re: HTML or Word Problems

by Siegwart Mayr -

Try copy and pasting into Resource (plain text).  It works fine, except for the tables.

Alternatives: 

  1. Add it as a Resource (uploaded file).  People will able to get the original Word document.
  2. Add it as a Resource (HTML text) after saving the Word doc into HTML. 
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In reply to Siegwart Mayr

Re: HTML or Word Problems

by Steven Day -
Word HTML formatting is notoriously bad.You could also save it as PDF file. I do this with some files to guarantee readibility. The only problem, which I just discovered today, is that in my browswer a pdf resource file displayed in the browser window will not show your resource summary. Any way around that, apart from removing that pdf viewer plugin?

Thanks.

Steven
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In reply to Steven Day

Re: HTML or Word Problems

by Steven Day -
To follow up, if you do not select "open browser in new window" the problem above can be avoided.

It's funny that M$ needs a filter to clean up its HTML in Word! No surprise though.

Best,

Steven
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In reply to Steven Day

Re: HTML or Word Problems

by Paul Duff -
The filter removes all the additional formatting code needed to permit subsequent editting in Word - and there's lot's of it!!!  Overall size reduction can be of the order of 75% I believe.
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In reply to Paul Duff

Re: HTML or Word Problems

by Tim Allen -
This filter is for Word 2000, whereas Word 2003 has a built-in function to save as "Filtered HTML".

I tested the latter function and it does the same job as the "Clean Word HTML" button in Moodle's HTML Editor. However, sometimes the formatting is still awry after "cleaning" the Word HTML (see the screenshot below). After looking at the resulting code, there were many fields like this:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:18.0pt'><u><span style='text-decoration:
none'>&nbsp;</span></u></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:18.0pt'><u><span style='text-decoration:
none'>&nbsp;</span></u></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:18.0pt'><u><span style='text-decoration:
none'>&nbsp;</span></u></p>

which I suspect to be remaining MS junk (but I'm not sure). Is it?

So these are the steps I took:

  1. Save the Word file as "Filtered HTML" (in Word 2003)
  2. Open the HTML code in a HTML editor and try to remove all the extraneous fields, and then reformat in a WYSIWYG view (using Dreamweaver)
  3. Then paste the resulting html code into the html editor in moodle.
  4. Finally I was still defeated, because I couldn't paste the code from DW into moodle - it would only paste a portion of the code!

I think I will just give up and upload pdf files! angry


Any comments or advice?


 
Attachment AfterCleanWdHTML.png
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