Maintaining posts with word processor (hint)

  • iainbr

    (@iainbr)


    19 years, 6 months ago

    I apologize if this is covered better elsewhere, or if there is a better technique, but I couldn’t find a good answer when I was looking, so I thought my solution might be helpful.

    I have a desire to post articles from a word processor for a couple of reasons. Partly that it’s much easier for me to maintain formatting in a word processor, and partly because I need to be able to take documents from others, and don’t want to hand-correct bold / italics in a text file. These are long articles (stories) which will probably go through a series of revisions.

    I’ve read a number of suggestions, most of which resolve to “paste into a text editor” before posting, but for each revision, that gets cumbersome. But every other suggestion I tried had problems, such as the conversion importing foreign unknown styles, or generating truly horrible HTML.

    What I do now is relatively easy, and has worked for me without problems every time.

    – Import the file into OpenOffice.
    – Select all, change the style to “Text body”.
    – Proof and tweak. (At this point I’d save the file in native OpenOffice format) and use it as the master for revisions.)
    – Save as HTML. (Not XHTML.)
    – Open the resulting HTML in a text editor. (I have Multi-Edit in “Send-To” under Windows, it saves a lot of effort.)
    – Copy between <BODY> and </BODY>
    – Create your blog article. Immediately open the HTML editor.
    – Paste and Update.

    OpenOffice’s HTML generation is clean and (using “Text body”) free of CSS. WordPress’s HTML conversion parses it perfectly – for all of the standard formatting I’ve tried. If you do anything more fancy, your mileage may vary.

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