Microsoft Word to Html Conversion Application
This case study gives a brief overview of a recent Monkeydevil software development project to create an application to convert Microsoft word documents to a pre-formatted html web page.
Project Overview
The client supplies home study courses around the world, often using the html format to distribute this material via the World Wide Web. Over time the client has built a large portfolio of courses all of which need converting from Microsoft word documents to a suitably styled html web pages. Various members of staff were given the task of manually converting these documents into html.
- This method of conversion was labour intensive and therefore slow to perform.
- Members of staff had varying experience of html programming or were using different html authoring software to produce the web pages. This was leading to differences in the formatting of web page content.
- Members of staff had differing interpretations on the standard styling of the web pages. This was leading to an increasingly diverging look and feel for the web pages.
Produce a software application that quickly converts Microsoft word documents to a standard html format to produce web pages with a unified look and feel.
Conversion Application
The final application takes a simple approach to the conversion process:
- The word document is saved in html format using word's own conversion process.
- The html produced by Microsoft word is loaded into the conversion application.
- The conversion software runs a number of routines to identify fixed patterns within the input documents (such documents headings, bulleted lists, images etc).
- Once a routine finds a matching pattern, the section of code has appropriate tags inserted to ensure that it is styled according to a standard cascading style sheet.
- Ultimately the conversion application produces a fully css styled html version of the original word document.
Project Summary
The conversion process still requires the human touch to ensure that the correct styling to reflect the author's original intent is maintained in the final document. However, overall the tool has resulted in much faster production of the html documents and has ensured that all the converted documents have a unified look and feel.
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