Print

Print


>I was just wondering in general how people were handling
>the conversion of these to HTML, i.e. whether people were
>plumping for Microsoft's interpretation of HTML produced
>by 'Save As HTML', or whatever...

Yuk.

>My main problem is that some documents (generally sent to
>me as 20+ pages of virtual A4 in a Word document) are so long,
>they merit being presented on the WWW site as PDFs... most of this
>information is for local access only, so ensuring the readers of the
>documents possess Acrobat Reader is not difficult...

Fine if you can guarantee PDF capability.

We use Transit Central by InfoAccess. Its not as great as they hype it to
be, but it has better conversion than Word, and allows automatic embedding
of hyperlinks, HTML navigation and TOCs. Its worst failing is that it
ignores TAB. Its great advantage is that you can get it running
/automatically/ so long as users dump the doc. into a shared folder on an
NT/95 box which runs 24hours.

>What methods are people using to get around these sorts of
>problems, such as the automation of the production of a
>'front-page' table of contents with links as either a PDF file,

We force everyone to fill in a form about docs they upload, creating a
metadatabase, which dynamically outputs a list of files for each part of
the intranet. TC itself will create TOCs but stupidly, using the filename
not any kind of title.

>Surely there must be a better solution than
>serving out the Word or whatever files directly from
>the WWW server to load into their local word-processor???!!

If you want to see TC in action, come visit the NHM and I'll show you (dont
all shout at once: DASAT- hey acronym city!).
cheers
Mike

p.s. If you dont mind doing things manualy HotMetal Pro has a reasonable
Word -> HTML import filter.




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%