So I’m working on the layout for Open Access Research in Microsoft Word, fully cognizant that I promised I’d deliver HTML as well as PDF.
I know better than to try getting at HTML through Microsoft Word. Been there, done that, would rather chew my left leg off at the hip than try it again. Next stop? OpenOffice.org.
Download, double-click, install, hm, this isn’t as bad as I remember it being back around version 1.2. Open up the test doc. Wow. Looks pretty good! Lost a line underneath the logo, but that’s no big deal. Everything else translated perfectly.
File menu, Export would seem the logical choice. Choose XHTML from the drop-down. Type a filename (odd UI problem there; I shouldn’t actually have to do this). Save. Take a deep breath. Open the result in my text editor.
Whoa.
I boggled for a good ten minutes, scrolling back and forth. Because, the markup produced? Conspicuously fails to suck. Conspicuously.
Perfect it ain’t. There’s all sorts of CSS in there that I don’t want or need (and boy, are those CSS bulleted lists ever fugly), and it didn’t pick up on my ArticleTitle style for some reason, and it didn’t manage to figure out that the Heading The First style was actually an <h1> despite a hint to that effect in the style definition, and it didn’t get rid of the footer (but then, I didn’t have any way to tell it to).
But it’s about as far from the you-know-what soup that Microsloth Turd spews out as it is possible to imagine. I can clean it up just the way I want in a few easily-scriptable regexes or SAX calls. It’s easy. Did I mention easy?
My hat’s off to the OpenOffice people. They most truly and sincerely rock.
