document width, Word-saved syllabus loses formatting Options

[Ben]

Something basic from a bumbling novice:

I created my course syllabus in Word and "saved as web page". The results lose a lot of formatting (such as tab positioning, etc.) and look crappy in windows of other than original width. I know it is desirable to keep web pages fluid, but in this case could I tweak the code to lock document width? How about converting the thing to a giant .gif and posting it that way? Code attached, for what it is worth. It will be hard to see why I object to the looks of the thing, since you won't have the image files available, but I don't know how to provide a link to the page in my college's Blackboard environment.

This post has been edited by Ben: Sep 1 2007, 08:51 AM

[Brian Chandler]

I created my course syllabus in Word and "saved as web page". The result

... is a pile of junk. The very notion of "save as web page" is a lie - it's a sort of pseudo-HTML document that can be read properly in M$-Whirred only.

Unfortunately there's no simple answer, since the best thing to do is start again.

[pandy]

Something basic from a bumbling novice:

I created my course syllabus in Word

Bad.

and "saved as web page".

Worse. Most of the code you see if you open the document in a text editor is Office junk, only understood by Office. That means someone using another browser than IE and not having Office installed won't be able to use that code. That's often a blessing. Office generated pages tend to work better without all that extra code.

The results lose a lot of formatting (such as tab positioning, etc.) and look crappy in windows of other than original width. I know it is desirable to keep web pages fluid, but in this case could I tweak the code to lock document width?

Why do you want to do that? It's basically all text, well suited to be displayed in a window of any size.

How about converting the thing to a giant .gif and posting it that way?

Ewww...

Code attached, for what it is worth. It will be hard to see why I object to the looks of the thing, since you won't have the image files available, but I don't know how to provide a link to the page in my college's Blackboard environment.

I don't know what a blackboard environment is, but you could upload the stuff to a server that's available to the world.

What you should do is take the text, mark it up with headings and paragraphs and learn how to float images. That shouldn't take you long at all and the page would be smaller/faster, look more as you want and you'd have the satisfaction of knowing you are in control, not Word.

http://htmlhelp.com/faq/html/docs.html#about-html

Look at align=left|right for floating images
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/special/img.html
This is better done with CSS, but maybe you want to start with all HTML.
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/box/float.html

[Ben]

Thanks for fast responses. I actually do know enough rudimentary html to put the thing together with tables, but was hoping for the quick and dirty approach of auto-coding + tweaking. Any suggestions for MAC-friendly basic web authoring software? Main requirement: free or cheap.

[pandy]

You don't need tables for the layout, only for the little data table I saw there. For the rest you just need paragraphs and headings and a list.

I've heard the free TextWrangler is good as well as it commercial big brother BBEdit.
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
Frederiek, who's on Mac, uses to recommend another one, but I've forgotten what it's called.

[Frederiek]

You must be mistaken, Pandy, as BBEdit it is and always will be for me! So your suggestion is good and accurate.

BTW, Ben, they are both text-editors, but have a lot that helps creating web pages.
But I do often recommend to go see Web Design References: CSS for a lot of links to articles on CSS (including fluid/liquid design).