Hi Russ and all,
M$ (!) Word does NOT translate well into html, no matter what "they"
tell you! At the very minimum, a user needs to turn off all "smart"
features, such as the one that turns double quotes into curly quotes or
two hyphens into an M-dash. Smart features become gibberish, and
normal word wraparound bolluxes up when one tries to save Word as
html--users might have to use hard returns to ensure that their text
takes up no more than 90% of a 800x600 screen resolution or fifty (50)
character spaces.
I'd tell students to avoid the save-Word-as-html option completely.
Those who don't have access to a web page program like Dreamweaver,
Adobe GoLive, or FrontPage can use one of the web-page templates in IE,
Netscape, or Mozilla Firefox. They're not fancy, but they're cheap and
they work. Online course software like WebCT also provides webpage
templates.
Hope this helps at bit!
Cheers, Amanda
Dr. Amanda Goldrick-Jones
Director, Centre for Academic Writing
University of Winnipeg
io.uwinnipeg.ca/~caw
On 25 Nov 2004, at 12:24, Russ Hunt wrote:
> Roger invited this.
>
>> Rants and Raves
>> Is there something about the teaching of language and literacy
>> that just drives you nuts? Come on, we know it drives you nuts
>> when students come to writing centre appointments without the
>> assignment. What else is bugging you?
>
> I don't know whether it's appropriate for the Newsletter, but
> I'd really appreciate hearing from Inkshedders who can answer
> any of the three questions at the end of this . . .
>
> I've got students creating assignments (lesson plans,
> essentially) for an eighteenth century literature course,
> posting them on a Web site so that the rest of the class can
> read them ahead of the meeting. One of them just posted a page
> which includes text that doesn't wrap. Text is displayed out two
> or three hundred characters to the right of the screen.
>
> She achieved this, she says, by composing the page in M$Word,
> and then saving it "as a Web page" -- M$Speak for HTML. This
> happened at the end of class Monday night, and I casually said,
> oh, don't bother; I'll copy the file and fix it for you.
>
> I spent over an hour yesterday trying to fix it without copying
> the entire text to a new file and reformatting everything
> manually in some different editor -- and failed. I can't find
> the code that means the text wraps in M$Word but not in a
> browser. I wound up converting the text to plain ASCII and re-
> introducing the formatting with Netscape Composer.
>
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