MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks

David A. Roth (david@roth-music.com)
Sun, 14 Jul 96 17:44:30 EST

Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
Next message: Lloyd Wood: "Re: MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks (fwd)"
Previous message: Ollivier Robert: "Re: SGML and FAQs (was: One FAQ, multiple newsgroups)"

I gave the Internet Assistant with MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) a test run. I
thought I would share my experiences with others here. As many of you
know, I am the co-author of the beloved Hosaphone(tm) FAQ. In addition
to it being kept on RTFM in ASCII, it is on Hosaphone(tm) Headquarters
in HTML.

I loaded hosaphone-faq.html in Word and confirmed it was an HTML file.
At first the translation appeared to be pretty normal. But then I
noticed some formatting that was slightly off. The white space wasn't
always there. So I figured I would fix it and then save the document.
I then reloaded the newly saved document. The problem re-appeared! It
also took out some blank lines. I thought perhaps the problem here
might be in its display from within Word only. So I viewed it from
Netscape and sure enough, Word with the help of it's Internet Assistant
changed the formatting. A line that was indented with 4 hard spaces
was deleted while the remaining text in that section was untouched. I
also tested it by loading a new copy in Word with the Internet
Assistant and saved it to a new file. Then opened it from Netscape and
it caused formatting problems too. I looked at the HTML that Word
wrote out and they placed their own credits in there:

This was all pretty annoying. I was hoping to be able to simply edit what
I saw in Word with the help of the Internet Assistant and then have a
good Netscape friendly HTML Netscape version. Could it be that
Microsoft is "conforming" to their own web browser and not Netscape? I
gave their web browser a test drive before and it crashed repeated on
trying to bring up their own home page.

ClarisWorks has HTML support, but you aren't editing exactly what you
will see either. I have the sinking feeling that the best way for a
Mac user to handle the writing of an FAQ is to manually put it into
HTML and view it often by loading it into Netscape to see how it will
look. If I have to be concerned with not seeing what you are getting
while I am editing, I might as well do it directly in HTML and avoid
the additional "proof reading" to check the utility that is creating
the HTML.

David A. Roth
david@roth-music.com
Co-author of the Hosaphone(tm) FAQ

Visit Hosaphone(tm) Headquarters at:
http://www.millcomm.com/~elw/hosaphone.html

Next message: Lloyd Wood: "Re: MS Word 6.0.1 (Mac) w/Internet Assistant, ClarisWorks (fwd)"
Previous message: Ollivier Robert: "Re: SGML and FAQs (was: One FAQ, multiple newsgroups)"

[ Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive | Search Mail Archive | Authors | Usenet ]
[ 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 ]