Winter Shutdown and Aspirations for the Future

[Penri]

Point taken on all that.

One minor hurdle, WMT has a Microsoft non-profit license for Office365 (or whatever its called) and those are the applications used on the Office PC plus Word appears to be the app of choice for most would be contributors.

From my tinkering Word can produce HTML, along with a directory of associated files. LiberOffice and my text editor appear to be perfectly happy to open the HTML file, without bothering with the other files.

If we took the approach of asking for the content created in Word and saved as HTML do you think that's a workable situation, initially for yourself to process but in the medium term somebody trained to process the input appropriately.

BTW I'd be looking for the "chief" content creator to define a style that all others will follow so we have some consistency across the piece.

[TerryJC]

Penri,

Could you create a suitable document in the Office copy of Word (eg, something like the target you sent me for the initial trial), save it as .docx and .html and send both files to me? No rush, but I just want to see if MS still have a penchant for adding cruft and sneaking in links to their servers.

I can open docx in LibreOffice so if the original does do sneaky stuff, we may still be able to get usable html from it.

[Penri]

Terry

Will send by e-mail the forum does not want to upload the HTML file.

Penri

[TerryJC]

Penri,

As I suspected, using Office 365 to create HTML is not for the faint hearted. See the attached Screenshot:

22-07-27_Screenshot.png (229.86 KiB) Viewed 201 times

In the directory called 'Office_365' you can see the original .docx file which is 71.7 kB and the exported html file which is 51.9 kB. The html contains over 1000 lines of code and is very definitely non-standard html.

In the same directory, you can see the html file that I generated by importing the .docx into LibreOffice and saving the result as html (WMT_Quarterjack.html 3.4 kB). This file has 75 lines and seems to be standard html.

Both files include references to Microsoft or Libreoffice. The Microsoft file makes extensive use of schema. This is not in itself a bad thing, but the usual way to do this is to use CSS.

In the directory called 'Minster_Info' you can see my original file which is 86 lines and 3.0 kB. This file contains the CSS and JS code calls and has no references to any tools.

As you can see the output from OpenOffice is reasonably close to what can be obtained by hand coding, so I propose that we instruct the users to
create the page that they want with Office 365 and export the result into a .docx file. This can then be post-processed into legal html by someone with the necessary skills, using the original .docx layout and format to ensure that the result is reasonably near to what the original author intended.

[Penri]

Hum, not ideal but it will do well as a start.
I’ll present the QR codes and resultant web pages at the next Board meeting and challenge the others to produce some content for us to publish.
When we’ve gauged the level of enthusiasm and effort made then we can think about how the process is done going forward.
Thank you for all you’ve done.

[TerryJC]

Penri,

I hadn't noticed that the earlier set of files sent by you were from your Mac; I thought they were from the Office. I've now seen your attachments to your email (ignore my message about not having any attachments, these something funny going on and both my Email clients deny there being any. It seems that the messages are composed in html and the attachments are invisible if viewed as text only.)

I've now retrieved them and the story is worse than with the files from your mac. The generated html (the .mht file) is now 166.9 kB and 2924 lines. When imported into LibreOffice I get 3.7 kB and 81 lines.

I think the proposed process of the original author producing the requirement in Word and sending out the docx for post-pressing in LibreOffice is the way forward.

[Penri]

Terry

I can only but agree with you.

[hamishmb]

It was cool to see the WMT model buildings google site. Should we link to that somewhere on this forum?

[Penri]

I have no issue with that being done.

The WMT Building site is made up of various views into a database within which I’ve tried to capture helpful information, it was invaluable in creating the model buildings.

[Penri]

The mains feed for SSR which switches the up-stream pump has been installed, the main supply comes from the Big Switch enclosure.

Photo shown SSR enclosure located with the Wendy Butts SAC (cover removed for photographic purposes only!).