Dreamweaver - Microsoft Word Junk - How do you get rid of it?

Author

Microsoft Word Junk - How do you get rid of it?

John Willingham

2004-02-25, 6:30 pm

Hi All,

What methods do you use for stripping all of the garbage html that MSWord
generates out of your content documents? The clean up Word HTML in DW does
certainly help but it doesn't remove all of the class and style tags and a
few other pieces of poo.

The Find and Replace specific tags can help a lot too but it still takes me
a few minutes on each document I receive to get all of the crap out and then
I have to reformat everything.

Sorry if I sound like a whiner. "I had to lift up my index finger over and
over again and each time I lifted it up I had to press this tiny button. It
took me minutes. Oh, it was awful!"

Thanks for your help!

--
John Willingham
Multimedia Developer
Office of Information Technology and Services
Emory University School of Medicine
404-712-8990
404-712-9624 (fax)

Murray *TMM*

2004-02-25, 7:28 pm

Which DW, John?

--
Murray --- ICQ 71997575
Team Macromedia Volunteer for Dreamweaver MX
(If you *MUST* email me, don't LAUGH when you do so!)
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"John Willingham" <jwillin@emory.edu> wrote in message
news:c1j7pj$sam$1@forums.macromedia.com...
> Hi All,
>
> What methods do you use for stripping all of the garbage html that MSWord
> generates out of your content documents? The clean up Word HTML in DW does
> certainly help but it doesn't remove all of the class and style tags and a
> few other pieces of poo.
>
> The Find and Replace specific tags can help a lot too but it still takes
me
> a few minutes on each document I receive to get all of the crap out and
then
> I have to reformat everything.
>
> Sorry if I sound like a whiner. "I had to lift up my index finger over and
> over again and each time I lifted it up I had to press this tiny button.
It
> took me minutes. Oh, it was awful!"
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> --
> John Willingham
> Multimedia Developer
> Office of Information Technology and Services
> Emory University School of Medicine
> 404-712-8990
> 404-712-9624 (fax)
>
>

Jonny M

2004-03-10, 12:33 pm

If you still have Dreamweaver MX installed, you can click File> Convert> 3.0
Browser Compatible. Convert: Both. Then, whipe out all font sizes and faces.
This will get rid of all Word styles. Unfortuantely, this feature has been
removed from MX 2004.

Now, does anyone know a quick way to get rid of all those crazy characters
that show up? I get weird apostrophes, quotations and dashes that show up as
weird characters in some browsers and printers.

- Jon

Jim

2004-03-10, 12:33 pm

HTML-Tidy

David B

2004-03-10, 1:29 pm

Another way to strip pages is to simply copy them into another medium,
like Notepad or even a post on a chatboard. Try copying the text
directly from the document you want to convert as well as previewing it
in a browser, then copying it from a browser. You just have to
experiment to see what works for each situation.

For example, I was trying to strip some FrontPage documents just
yesterday. I finally previewed them in a browser, copied all the text,
then pasted it into Notepad. Then I copied the text from Notepad into
Dreamweaver, and I was left with little but text and paragraph tags; it
worked beautifully.

I still haven't figured out a really simple way to deal with "weird
characters." It seems like apostrophes, quotations, etc. come in three
or four varieties. I generally just do a search and replace, replacing
the weird characters with Dreamweaver's "special characters."

But make sure you make a copy of your files first. If you accidentally
replace text in source code, you can really screw things up. Also, there
seems to be some sort of bug relating to one of the apostrophe
characters. When I do a search and replace, instead of just replacing
the weird apostrophes, it appears to stick apostrophes in every open
space, or something like that. I don't need hundreds of apostrophes on
any of my pages. :)

Jonny M wrote:
> If you still have Dreamweaver MX installed, you can click File> Convert> 3.0
> Browser Compatible. Convert: Both. Then, whipe out all font sizes and faces.
> This will get rid of all Word styles. Unfortuantely, this feature has been
> removed from MX 2004.
>
> Now, does anyone know a quick way to get rid of all those crazy characters
> that show up? I get weird apostrophes, quotations and dashes that show up as
> weird characters in some browsers and printers.
>
> - Jon
>
>

Jonny M

2004-03-10, 1:29 pm

Weird characters:

Try this in MX 2004...
Copy your text from Word. Paste it into Code View.
Save the file. Close it. Re-open it.

MX2004 seems to replace all those funky characters with the correct ones.