MS Word and HTML

During my lunch hour at work I tend get my laptop out and start doing a bit of writing. I'm not going to call myself an author... I've been working on this particular sci-fi story since the '90s, I've changed it quite dramatically several times over that period.

Anyway, I have this in Microsoft Word format. The program itself is quite a decent word processor (no, I'm not trolling).

I thought it might be a good idea to put the first part of my book on the web. I could then hand the link to my friends and if any of them actually wanted to read it, they could. (hardly likely I know).

Word will save HTML. Simple!

You'd have thought...

Have you SEEN the HTML word produces?

According to 'wc' it was 4871 lines long, of which 1137 (Yes, One Thousand, One Hundred and Thirty Seven) lines were defining styles. That's nearly A QUARTER. Although, admittedly in characters that's 29013 out of 205403 which doesn't sound quite so bad at 14%.

I stripped out a load of it 'cos Word doesn't do it for you (at least not the version of Word I use...2010 I think, It has the ghastly ribbon anyway - don't get me started on that! Half the features are missing or hidden... STOP!!!!... calm yourself... breath slowly...).

So I cut out the extraneous style definitions out with emacs. Easy! The rest is just nice and simple HTML.

Well...

You know how HTML defines some extended characters with special & sequences, like &..? Word doesn't!

Can you believe that?????

Elipsis: char 0x85, Smart quotes: 0x93 and 0x94, and single smart quotes ... blah blah... My HML had nine "Special" Characters in it. I realise these are probably valid in the character set it defines, and it does render OK in chrome... but, come on!

I had to write A PERL SCRIPT to remove this C*@P!

And then there's footnotes. What could be difficult about footnotes?

CONSISTENCY, that's what!

[1]
[2]
[3]
[4][4] Yes this appeared TWICE
¹ What the???
²
[7]
... and so on ... AND SO ON ....

And I had to FIX THIS MESS!

WHY NOT HAVE A SIMPLE HTML OUTPUT FILTER!!!!!

The amount of time I WASTED P!@@1NG AROUND WITH THIS!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGHH!!!