RTF --> HTML editor

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

As part of my molasses Wamp server and Website Baker and MySQL and Alpha5 and Navicat  and this and that project I realize I need to do some straight HTML coding.  I am a programmer of sorts (RPG on iSeries mostly) so theoretically all that is cake.  In practice .. well. we shall see.

I saw the HTMLPro special today on Bits .. and I know we have lots of other editors mentioned.  Decisions, decisions. While it is not the most advanced, I see that the HTMLPro is sweet in the color coding and formatting dept, good for beginner-intermediates.  

Now I really have one simple kindergarten question to start.

A lot of the material I bring into the editor will already have format from an email or forum, maybe RTF.  Color, height, bold, italics (conceivably fonts, but not important).  I know some webforums will take the paste and hold the formatting very nicely.  (Not an issue here because we are Plain Sam.)  And with an on/off toggle for the mode.

So I want my HTML editor to receive such RTF paste input without intermediate steps, or minimal.  Do they all do that ? None ?  How about HTMLPro ? (I tried a quick test and did not see how.) What would they call it ?

Any help appreciated, since I am considering the big $18 purchase.  If you want to mention the many excellent editor products fine, although we could bump up one of the editor threads for that.

Any help appreciated.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

[40hz]

My fav for cleaning copied material I want to paste as plain text is a small free utility called PureText.

http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

Have you ever copied some text from a web page or a document and then wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple by adding a new Windows hot-key (default is WINDOWS+V) that allows you to paste text to any application without formatting.

After running PureText.exe, you will see a "PT" tray icon appear near the clock on your task bar.  You can click on this icon to remove formatting from the text that is currently on the clipboard.  You can right-click on the icon to display a menu with more options.

What PureText Will and Will Not Do

    PureText only removes rich formatting from text.  This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc.  However, it does not modify the actual text.  It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space.  It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs.  If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags.  If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

    PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY.  The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

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[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

My fav for cleaning copied material I want to paste as plain text is a small free utility called PureText.

Yep .. that is good, I use Eudora right now for cleaning, so the savings would be small.

What I want to do is retain the formatting when it goes into the HTML editor.  In other words the editor recipient may have to do a bit of formatting when receiving the paste. That is why the forums who do this have a toggle mode.

Shalom,
Steven

[app103]

If you open an .rtf file in a decent word processing application, you can resave the file as .html. I know both MS Word and OpenOffice Writer can both do this.

Once you have saved it as .html, you can continue edit it in the word processor, or in the html editor of your choice.

And OpenOffice Writer does retain most of the formatting on a paste from a web page (color, size, hyperlinks, bold, italics, underline, etc)...but not the font used. (just tested it to make sure)

And best of all, OpenOffice is free. 

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

Yeah, I just gave it a try. Abiword saved the .html and HTMLPad picked it up. Some of the color was lost.  I do not have OpenOffice on this puter though, would like to see if it does better.  I like OO but recently switched to Abi for a light WP system.

And best of all would be direct conversion into the HTML editor.

Shalom,
Steven

[PPLandry]

If you're looking to program it yourself through a DLL or you want to batch process alot of files, checkout IRUN RTF converter. It is free and does a good (but not perfect) conversion of RTF to HTML:

http://www.pilotltd.com/index_en.jsp?pagenum=221

HTH

[JavaJones]

Interestingly a lot of web-based editors include this kind of functionality as a "Paste from Word" button or similar, but I don't see any desktop apps that do it. There must be some though. Maybe the "paste from word" concept will help in further searching?

- Oshyan

[PPLandry]

I think the "Paste from Word" feature basically filters out non standard tags, but do not do RTF->HTML conversion. Word puts a number of formats on the clipboard, one of them is HTML.

[JavaJones]

Perhaps true, but whatever it is doing, the end result is fairly functional HTML.

- Oshyan