Comments on: WordOff: The Cure for the Word Blues http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/2009/02/10/wordoff-the-cure-for-the-word-blues/ Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:46:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7 hourly 1 By: Chris Loosley http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/2009/02/10/wordoff-the-cure-for-the-word-blues/comment-page-1/#comment-9 Chris Loosley Sat, 04 Jul 2009 01:15:15 +0000 http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/?p=3#comment-9 I disagree that cleaning a generated html file in WordOff is anything like like pasting it into Notepad. If you drop html source into notepad, you will still have ALL your html, including the tag soup that needs to be cleaned. On the other hand, if you paste some displayed text into notepad, you then have only unformatted text. Neither approach is particularly useful, unless you really want to start from scratch again, marking up that text by hand, or formatting it in another editor. In contrast, if you drop that html tag soup into WordOff, you get back a cleaned html file, comprising text that is still marked up with the tags for paragraphs, bold, italic, and links, but without all the divs, spans, font specifications and empty or repeated html elements, and with consecutive line breaks reduced to two. About the only routine html cleanup tasks it doesn't do for you are begin all paragraphs on a new line, and convert a series of paragraphs that begin with a "bullet" character into an unordered list. Those you still have to do by hand -- but it's straightforward to find them once most of the extraneous tags have been removed. I have no connection with Tom Dyson, the author, but I have found his tool invaluable in cleaning up pages and pages of messy html generated by who knows what -- probably Word or some other WYSIWYG editor -- before I got it. I disagree that cleaning a generated html file in WordOff is anything like like pasting it into Notepad. If you drop html source into notepad, you will still have ALL your html, including the tag soup that needs to be cleaned. On the other hand, if you paste some displayed text into notepad, you then have only unformatted text. Neither approach is particularly useful, unless you really want to start from scratch again, marking up that text by hand, or formatting it in another editor.

In contrast, if you drop that html tag soup into WordOff, you get back a cleaned html file, comprising text that is still marked up with the tags for paragraphs, bold, italic, and links, but without all the divs, spans, font specifications and empty or repeated html elements, and with consecutive line breaks reduced to two.

About the only routine html cleanup tasks it doesn’t do for you are begin all paragraphs on a new line, and convert a series of paragraphs that begin with a “bullet” character into an unordered list. Those you still have to do by hand — but it’s straightforward to find them once most of the extraneous tags have been removed.

I have no connection with Tom Dyson, the author, but I have found his tool invaluable in cleaning up pages and pages of messy html generated by who knows what — probably Word or some other WYSIWYG editor — before I got it.

]]> By: Daniel http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/2009/02/10/wordoff-the-cure-for-the-word-blues/comment-page-1/#comment-8 Daniel Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:08:14 +0000 http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/?p=3#comment-8 Hi David! Thanks for stopping by! WordOff serves the same purpose as pasting content into Notepad. There's nothing different about what it does. What we've noticed is that some content managers are more apt to remember this in-between step if they have a bookmark for WordOff staring right back at them from their browser's toolbar. Hi David! Thanks for stopping by! WordOff serves the same purpose as pasting content into Notepad. There’s nothing different about what it does.

What we’ve noticed is that some content managers are more apt to remember this in-between step if they have a bookmark for WordOff staring right back at them from their browser’s toolbar.

]]> By: David http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/2009/02/10/wordoff-the-cure-for-the-word-blues/comment-page-1/#comment-7 David Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:56:57 +0000 http://www.sonomacreative.com/blog/?p=3#comment-7 How is this different than pasting to notepad? How is this different than pasting to notepad?

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