very basic (I think) html question

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Here--I'll get this out of the way first:

I'm embarrassed to ask this because I've been editing an online journal for about 3 years, and have always just found ways around the problem I'm about to describe--but I have a very basic question, and I suspect the answer is pretty basic too.

Our journal publishes a lot of "experimental poetry"--which in practical terms means a lot of weird formatting, usually done in MSWord--and it's important to our authors that the poems appear on the web the way they wrote them in their word processor. Usually that's not a problem--I can approximately duplicate what they're doing without any difficulty. But for the issue I'm working on I have a poem that I can NOT get to work in html--no way, no how.

So my question is this: I know there's a tag you can use that retains formatting, but I don't really know it. Failing that, does anyone know a simple way to bring MSWord-formatted text documents into an html document without losing the formatting--short of going through and adding all of the stupid little tabs, spaces and carriage returns that these guys are doing in their word processors? It would help me get rid of a MAJOR headache.

[photon]

Easiest way, take a screenshot and make it an image.

Has the bonus of being far tougher to copy.

Otherwise there's no real easy way, copy/paste from Word will produce amazingly awful HTML that might not even work, so you're left with manually approximating what they did.

Or you could put a content management system like Wordpress in place and then have them use an online editor (similar to the editor to post here but much more robust) to format and submit everything themselves.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Thanks, photon. Looks like there's no shortcut!

I like the third option best--but I think I'd have a rebellion on my hands. A lot of the people we publish use Word as if it's a typewriter, which makes my life a lot of fun.

[ma-skis.com]

try using the <pre> where pre stands for pre formatted text </pre> tags

you can format it with spaces and line breaks however you want in your code and it should look exactly like that on the page.

if you ever have questions for web design, check www.w3schools.com lots of html hints tips and excellent sampling windows.

[psicodude]

Photon is bang on with the image thing. Assuming you are using formatting to create visual effects, you are going to have nothing but problems. You will have to deal with different browsers, operating systems, and (most importantly) different screen resolutions. A real nightmare. I suppose you could try doing some crazy stuff with tables, but that can get really complicated really fast.

[gottabekd]

If they are just using spaces, tabs, font, font sizes to format, there shouldn't be too much difficulty using CSS to get the text to appear exactly the same as they see in Word.

But if they do any formatting beyond those basics, it is unlikely anything but a screenshot will be able to duplicate the look exactly.

[Barnes]

You can try to upload the word docs they send you to a google docs account and from there you can export as html. I have never tried this so i don't know what kind of html you would get.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Originally Posted by ma-skis.com

try using the <pre> where pre stands for pre formatted text </pre> tags

you can format it with spaces and line breaks however you want in your code and it should look exactly like that on the page.

if you ever have questions for web design, check www.w3schools.com lots of html hints tips and excellent sampling windows.

That actually did the trick. Thanks!

[ma-skis.com]

np