Convert Word documents to the Web

Convert Word documents to HTML

Open the document in Word and go to menu File -> Save As. Save the file as a HTML file.

To get consistent formatting when converting, it is important to use the header styles in Word and to use them consistently. Don't sometimes use the header styles and other times just increase the font size.

Can I use Word as my HTML editor?

Word can be used to create Web pages, but we don't recommend that you use it as a HTML editor for two reasons:

1.      Word creates very large HTML files full of what some people call "junk code" in an attempt to format the document exactly as a word document. Now it may be true that you didn't carefully format the document in Word and didn't care that it attempted to duplicate your font and font size and every detail of it, but it will do so anyway. It does this by use of style sheets. You will find the HTML very difficult to edit with a different tool, were you to want to do so, because of its complexity.

2.      It is difficult to control the location of standard elements such as logos. When Word saves a document as HTML, it saves any such elements into images, renamed, of course, in a subdirectory named the same as the filename. So if you were to create 100 memos using the memo logo, you would end up with a hundred subdirectories each containing the very same logo.

What if I need to edit a web page created with Word?

You can load the HTML file into Word again if you don't have the original Word document available. You can, in fact, load any HTML file into Word. However, it will add a lot of extraneous HTML code so you may not want to do this if you ever want to edit the page with a different HTML editor.

Clean up Word-generated HTML using Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver can be used to remove the extraneous HTML code generated by Word. Open the Word-generated  HTML file in Dreamweaver. Go to Menu “Command” and select “Clean Up Word HTML”. This will significantly reduce the “junk code” in your HTML file and makes maintenance much easier.

Convert Postscript to PDF

The standard way to convert Postscript files to PDF is by using Adobe Acrobat. Although the Acrobat Reader is free, the converter is not. If you are doing a lot of conversions or if you are scanning transparencies or other materials to put on the Web, purchasing Acrobat is recommended.

However, if you only have an occasional file to convert, you can use:

http://www.ps2pdf.com/

The instructions are all there. You simply browse to your postscript file and press convert. Note, to see your postscript files, you might have to change the "Files of Type" below the Filename: box to All Files (*.*). Then press the Convert button.