Microsoft Word To HTML Template Conversion

FRIDAY, 22 OCTOBER 2010 

We’ve just completed our latest software development project, a small application that takes the contents of a Microsoft word document and uses it to populate a preformatted html template.

The client provides home study courses, each of which are available in a range of formats from word and pdf to web-based html formats. Most of the courses are originally produced as word documents and then converted into html web pages for use on the Internet. This process was causing two problems for our client:

1. A lot of time was being spent performing the conversions

2. Different people were producing the web pages and introducing significant differences in the style of the finished pages

The client wanted to speed up the process and standardise the style of the html versions of the courses being produced. Monkeydevil were employed to create a conversion tool that could overcome these problems.

The approach used for the conversion tool is quite simple. The software uses a number of routines that identify fixed patterns (such as bulleted lists) within a word-generated html version of itself. Once a ‘pattern’ has been identified the content can be removed from the word-generated html and placed into an appropriately styled html structure for use on the client’s website.

The conversion still requires the human touch to ensure that the correct styling to reflect the authors original intent is maintained but 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.