I have to make a release notes document in word based on an xml export from Jira.
Some of the fields that we need in the release notes document are rich text enabled. In reality the output is html styled text.
To be able to mix the html text and the plain text from Jira, we opted to use the word html (save a word document as web page) as a template.
Then we use xslt to add the needed values from the xml export into the word html template.
This seems to be working quite ok, but we ran into a problem.
The release notes format in word has a lot of styles (some of them are custom build)
But in the document we get when opening the transformed file (thus technically HTML) we only get 2 styles: Normal and heading1
(I prepared 2 screenshots, but I can't post images yet)
My question now is:
Is there a way to add these styles to the word html part so these can still be used by our users to edit the document after it is generated.
I thought there had to be something I could add here to insert these styles. But I can't seem to figure out what.
there is a style part in the html, so that is what I primarily have been looking at.
any help would be appreciated. Even if you just point me to some documentation about word html, or to someone who might know this.
Kind regards
Peter
As an alternative approach, you could consider docx4j.XHTMLImport.
If your incoming XHTML contains #class values with the same names as styles in the target docx, then the converted content will use those styles.
Related
I'm working on a document printout from MS PowerApps. Best method I have found thus far is to write it in HTML and but save as a .doc file so that it opens in word online. From there, the user can save as PDF. So far, this works surprisingly well and allows for a great deal of control over the output, but one limitation I have found is that word does not seem to recognize multiple classes on a single element. This is kind of a pain as I am using a lot of tables, so I have to either create a new class for every single cell cell format I need or use inline CSS instead. Not huge issue, but it makes for messy code and time consuming updates. Is there any way to achieve this?
Edit:
File here: https://wetransfer.com/downloads/29323f5c8060a374ed23e8ff2b6e9fd320210116015928/c991f4
It's designed to open in word online but it works in desktop as long as the view mode is set to print layout and not web layout.
Edit2: I should note that I did not figure out the headers all by myself, but worked off of some code provided by Georgi Nikolov found here
You can't write HTML or CSS Code into MS Word.
MS Word is Rich Text Editor
Rich Text: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a file format that allows the exchange of text files between different editors and it has its formatting so we can't use it to write HTML.
HTML Must be written in Plain Text Editor because Plain text contains no formatting, only line breaks and spacing. Therefore no text formatting (such as font sizes and colors, bolding or italics) can be used.
some examples for Plain TextEditors that you can use to write HTML and CSS are Notepad and Notepad++
I copy a text from a source in a platform. It is a private platform that has a box where you can type text. There is a button where you can see the HTML source code afterwards. I copied numerous texts with no problem. When I am trying to copy-paste the above, I noticed that in the HTML code a specific tag gets produced.
<p><strong><em><span lang="en-gb">Week of the 5th of September</span></em></strong></p>
So, my question is, how is that possible. Does a text after copying it generates specific tags? So, in the copying process, some things get copied apart from the text we can see... Also, this could be happening because the source text (that is about to be copied) contains characters that are not supported from the unicode set up in the platform (web application)?
I am really curious to understand what is happening.
Based on the fact you said it had a button where you can view source, this sounds like a WYSIWIG (What you see is what you get) editor like CKeditor, TinyMCE, Froala, etc. They take standard HTML textarea elements and using Javascript and CSS convert them into more robust editors. They allow you to do simple text formatting in the textarea, upload images, view source, etc.
They are used a lot in blogs and for content editing for people that don't write code but want to be able to manage and maintain content in web sites. For instance if you type a "paragraph" of text in one of these it will automatically wrap it with the appropriate <p> tags using Javascript.
In your case you're adding content in this box, and it's simply applying the formatting to it with Javascript. It will do the same if you just type in the box, vs. copy/paste.
Here are some links to WYSIWIG editors so you can learn more about how they function:
http://ckeditor.com/
https://www.tinymce.com/
https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor
Fun Fact: The editor you used when you typed your question on Stack Overflow uses one of these. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121981/stackoverflow-official-wmd-editor
It`s not much information, so I‘ll take a guess:
For <strong><em>: The website could eventually use a div with the contenteditable="true" attribute (more info on mdn) as the input method. When you then paste in text from another application that already has markup like bold or italic, it‘s converted to html tags.
The <span lang="en-gb"> could come from the browser, another application or the website through analyzing the text and adding this.
my objective is to generate HTML markup to target ms word. So far my findings are, if you have all the styles inline to an element, the document, when opened in word renders properly. However it is lengthy task.
<h1 style="font-family:Arial">Inventory</h1>
This is how I try to achieve formatting. If i want to maintain a constant font across the document, in my HTML, I'd have to add font-family to all the elements like I've done above.
Later, I came across a codeproject article. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/office/Wordyna.aspx Now I am sort of convinced that you can declare the styles globally, but the styling language used and the formatting is not like CSS, and, I think its proprietary to ms word document formatting. I am looking for any tutorials/articles for this styling being used.
ps: I am aware about OpenXML etc, etc. I feel its too complex for me to implement at this point.
Word --should-- open valid (read: not Microsoft's proprietary html-ish mess) without fail as it's the rendering engine for Outlook when you open an HTML email. You could go to the effort to build a document entirely in-line (read: only best practice for Microsoft) as we do for HTML emails, but I suspect there are several different ways to skin this cat.
Personally, if I was trying to get a rich text formatted document from html to Word I'd use a tool such as PHPDocX to build a proper word document natively, then if I really wanted Word HTML I could simply hit save on Word. I've had to do similarly with Excel, where it will accept CSV, but the outcome is always better with XLSX, and there's a similar plugin to easily author a proper XLSX document.
If that's too difficult a route (and it's not that bad, trust me) then I'd stick to formatting following HTML Email rules. Simple guides are all over the web, such as here. And, since Outlook 07-current uses Word's html rendering engine, one could deduce that it has the same limitations listed here
I'm searching for a "suck less" WYSIWYG in-browser X?HTML editor that generates good HTML code.
(no <font>, <foo style="...">, <p></p><span></span><p><span> </span><span><span>blah</span></<span></p> and so on -- <b> and <i> etc is ok).
Should be easy-to-use as it is going to be used by people that do not know what HTML is.
Any suggestions?
Extra points for Copy-and-Paste-from-Word-readiness! :-)
(I found a lot of editors but they all create that <font> and nested <span> crap that breaks site design and bloats a site with one table up to 100kB.)
Download the current version of CKEditor and look at the XHTML output sample. It shows how to use full WYSIWYG but it doesn't generates font or styles. You just need to adjust the configuration to your needs.
What about WYMEditor?
WYMeditor has been created to generate perfectly structured XHTML strict code, to conform to the W3C XHTML specifications and to facilitate further processing by modern applications.
With WYMeditor, the code can't be contaminated by visual informations like font styles and weights, borders, colors, ... The end-user defines content meaning, which will determine its aspect by the use of style sheets. The result is easy and quick maintenance of information.
I've used it a little and while it takes quite a bit of tweaking if you have very specific needs, it does work out of the box for simple XHTML editing. If you set up specially annotated CSS files then it will detect the styles you want users to use and block level elements to which they apply. You can also tell it how to display these styles in the editor (which might be different from how you want them displayed in the resulting XHTML).
Of course, it generates XHTML, not HTML, so it may not meet your exact needs.
Wikipedia has a category for them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:JavaScript-based_HTML_editors
You can use Markdown with the WMD UI, it's the one used by Stack Overflow. It always produces valid HTML code.
I just recently searched for an editor to create solid documentation, whose output is suitable for Subversion diffs: https://superuser.com/questions/126621/wysiwyg-editor-for-structured-text-suitable-for-svn-versioning
The editor that was suggested - "KompoZer" - turned out to be fantastic, especially because it generates very clean HTML (in my opinion). And I say that, although I had originally preferred something leaner than HTML.
P.S. Reading your question again, I'm not sure, what you mean with a "browser editor" - are you looking for an editor that can be integrated in an HTML page? KompoZer is based on a browser, but it can probably not be integrated in an HTML page.
I recently switched one of my projects to markdown to avoid this exact issue. There's still a bit of a learning curve for the users but I haven't had to deal with the usual issues that occur when they copy/paste content from Word and wonder why it blew up.
Having said that, I prefer CKEditor over TinyMCE and the Telerik controls. I've generally found it generates somewhat cleaner HTML.
There are several WYSIWG editors for embedding within your website out there.
WYMeditor (http://www.wymeditor.org/) looks very nice and seems to be a good fit for targetting clean and valid XHTML results.
Spaw2. Although it's kinda abandoned now.
The Apple Cocoa NSTextView class exports quite nice html, where all the fiddling is done through specifying a style sheet in the header. The Apple TextEdit editor uses this.
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ - easy to use, can import form Word, and restrict formatting to predefined CSS styles, to provide consistent output.
This post is 8+ years old now but still relevant...
I found an awesome github page with a curated list of WYSIWYG editors, including a few WYSIWYM ones which guarantee sane html. As of 2018, the most current and best WYSIWYM one looks like ProseMirror, or maybe ORY Editor if you're looking for something to edit entire webpages(!) in one textfield.
[We have a Windows Forms database front-end application that, among other things, can be used as a CMS; clients create the structure, fill it, and then use a ASP.NET WebForms-based site to present the results to publicly on the Web. For added flexibility, they are sometimes forced to input actual HTML markup right into a text field, which then ends up as a varchar in the database. This works, but it's far from user-friendly.]
As such… some clients want a WYSIWYG editor for HTML. I'd like to convince them that they'd benefit from using simpler language (namely, Markdown). Ideally, what I'd like to have is a WYSIWYG editor for that. They don't need tables, or anything sophisticated like that.
A cursory search reveals a .NET Markdown to HTML converter, and then we have a Windows Forms-based text editor that outputs HTML, but apparently nothing that brings the two together. As a result, we'd still have our varchars with markup in there, but at least it would be both quite human-readable and still easily parseable.
Would this — a WYSIWYG editor that outputs Markdown, which is then later on parsed into HTML in ASP.NET — be feasible? Any alternative suggestions?
I think the best approach for this is to combine
Converting Markdown to HTML &
Displaying HTML in WinForms
The most up to date Markdown Library seems to be markdig which you can install via nuget
A simple implementation might be to:
Add a SplitContainer to a Form control, set Dock = Fill
Add a TextBox, set Dock = Fill and set to Multiline = True
Add a WebBrowser, set Dock = Fill
Then handle the TextChanged event, parse the text into html and set to DocumentText like this:
private void textBox1_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var md = textBox1.Text;
var html = Markdig.Markdown.ToHtml(md);
webBrowser1.DocumentText = html;
}
Here's a recorded demo:
#Soeren,
You can most definitely embed IE with the Javascript Markdown editor inside a Windows Forms application.
the RichTextBox control
So you want to use Markdown but you want the user not to know it? This might not be an achievable goal. I think the point of Markdown is that it is geared toward writers that are willing to learn a little bit of fairly natural syntax and edit everything in plain text (like Wikipedia? are there pure WYSIWYG editors for that? probably... and probably some other Wikipedia editor person has to come and clean up the resulting markup and formatting...). If you want it to be transparent to the user (like MS Word) Markdown may not be what you want or give you the advantages it advertises in that situation.
The input happens in Windows Forms
Oops! Now I understand better your question. I guess it depends on how your Windows Forms app looks whether the embedded IE control sticks out like a sore thumb. If you try it you might find that you can get it to work.[1]
In your position, I would try something like this [2]:
http://wmd-editor.com/examples/splitscreen
If you don't think that sort of arrangement will go over well with your users, (especially all the editing in the text-only window) then once again I don't think Markdown is the answer for your specific application. If you think your users are keen on the idea of editing pure text, then I bet we can find a solution. Please clarify?
Jared.
[1] I had success dropping an IE HTML control into a project strictly to display some generated results as a PDF (using an IE Reader plugin like Adobe Reader or Foxit). The user has no idea that that part of the GUI is an IE control, it just shows the PDF, allows printing and saving, etc.
[2] ...but remove the borders and make the two split controls touch all four edges of the embedded IE control, or get very close... keep it light grey or white, for example, and eliminate any borders of the IE control so it blends into the surrounding controls. Maybe put this on its own tab page and I challenge a non-technical user to tell/care if it's an HTML control or native.
I could totally be wrong about all this (one would have to see this in action to determine if it would work) but it might be easier than writing your own interactive Markdown editor...
...actually to implement your own C# Markdown editor, you could just put a text edit box next to an embedded IE control and run the current Markdown through the .NET Markdown->HTML converter on a separate thread, and replace the HTML in the IE control (assuming the Markdown->HTML converter is very liberal and robust against throwing ANY exceptions).
Can't you just use the same control I'm Stack Overflow uses (that we're all typing into)---WMD, and just store the Markdown in the VARCHAR. Then use the .NET Markdown to HTML converter, as you mentioned, to display the HTML as needed. Jeff talks about this in more detail in a StackOverflow podcast (don't know the episode number).
"WYSIWYG Markdown" is really an oxymoron since the whole point of Markdown is to allow you to write markup syntax naturally and intuitively which is then post-processed into html, unless you mean actually taking for example **text** and rendering it as **text** for example. That would actually be kind of cool, but it would get very difficult for things like numbered and bulleted lists, since you would have to do all the positioning, yet keep everything based on actual textual characters (e.g. '*' instead of the bullet symbol) and support proper textual input positioning, backspace, etc.
For example,
in this bullet list,
the bullets would actually have to be asterisks,
and the spacing would not really be there.
That would certainly be worth paying attention to, if someone did tackle it.