Conversion from Word – (mostly) Solved!

Simplest method I’ve been able to find:

1. Open Word file, select & copy material.
2. Go to the demo page for CKEditor, http://ckeditor.com/demo.
3. Click the “Paste From Word” button and paste the content.
4. Click the “Source” button in CKEditor
5. Copy HTML source code
6. Paste into an HTML document. I’m using Flux and RapidWeaver for that.

Amazingly, my images seem to have come through as well. There’s no horrible excess of <span> or <div> tags, no font specifications, none of that cruft. so I can add those in later to make it more meaningful. The headings and basic markup are there, nothing else.

Here it is in the “saved-from-word” HTML:

<p class=MsoNormal>&nbsp;</p>

<p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-.25in'>1.<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>What bond breaks in the first step? </p>

<p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-.25in'>2.<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>In the second step, one bond breaks and two bonds form. Which are they? </p>

<p class=MsoListParagraph style='text-indent:-.25in'>3.<span style='font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
</span>Compare the relative energies of the reactants (t-BuCl + B<sup>-</sup>);
the intermediates (t-Bu<sup>+</sup>, Cl<sup>-</sup>, and B<sup>-</sup>); and
the products (2-methylpropene, Cl<sup>-</sup>, and HB). </p>

And the same material done from the above method:

<ol>
 <li>What bond breaks in the first step?</li>
 <li>In the second step, one bond breaks and two bonds form. Which are they?</li>
 <li>Compare the relative energies of the reactants (t-BuCl + B-); the intermediates (t-Bu+, Cl-, and B-); and the products (2-methylpropene, Cl-, and HB).</li>

So I lose the superscript tags for the ions, but the list format is done properly with tags and the whole code is much more readable.  It’s a very worthy trade-off.

The images are still saved with very generic names, so I will have to come up with some kind of system for naming them properly and keeping them sorted.
(from Word)

 <p class=MsoNormal><img width=266 height=62 id="_x0000_i1027"
src="markovnikov%20from%20word_files/image003.png"></p>

and from CKEdit:

<p><img src="file://localhost/Users/dave/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_image006.png" style="height:62px; width:266px; " ></p>

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This was so easy that I downloaded the ckeditor library, from their website (http://ckeditor.com/download), made my own local page following their tutorial. Now, the only annoying bit is fixing the images from their location in a temp folder to a meaningful location in the web site directory.