RE: [PHP-WIN] Is it possible to CONVERT file formats?

I've player around with a few concepts involving this, and come up with 3 possible (although tricky) solutions: 1. Use your own code similar to the UBB syntax used on many message board systems. Here users can use HTML-like codes such as [b]Text in bold[/b], [i]text in italics[/i] etc - it's very easy for them to learn and doesn't scare people as much as HTML. 2. Get users to "save as HTML" from Word documents then upload the HTML files via an upload form. The script then needs to strip off the <head> section and <body> tags - as long as they haven't put any fixed width tables or images in the document this will work fine, so it helps if you have guidelines for the creation of documents (i.e don't put images in there). 3. User Dynamic HTML and some pretty tricky CSS / JavaScript stuff to give users a WYSIWYG interface for editing their documents. This is hard to describe but an example of it in action can be seen here: http://gossamer-threads.com/tmp/editor/ The first option is easy to implement but means users have to learn something new, the second works great but requires users to save stuff as HTML (which may lead to confusion) and the third option whlie impressive only works on MSIE and would be incredibly difficult to set up. Alternatively using PHP's COM functions should allow you to use Word itself to process the files (for example save them as HTML then strip the header sections etc) - which is probably the best solution. -----Original Message----- From: Darvin Andrioli [mailto:darvin.andrioli@caricese.it] Sent: 25 January 2001 08:55 To: 'Mike Flynn'; php-windows@lists.php.net Subject: RE: [PHP-WIN] Is it possible to CONVERT file formats? Hi Mike I'm wrinting an intranet site where my colleagues can write notes about their job, so I'm interested to your post. I evaluated many ways to write this notes.Html? No, nobody knows html. Word? Yes it may be a possible solution. As you wrote its usefull get only the text, because I get the control of many visualization aspect ( background color, text disposition ,... ) I'm evaluating other way. Textarea may be another possible solution. I haven't character format like bold, italics, but it is easy to install, you need only the browser, ad it's simple to use. If I insert some button, and ,using javascript code, I put particular tag inside the textarea ( i.e. HTML tag for bold, italic,.. ), I can give to my collegues some format control over the text without any html knowledge about html. In this moment I prefer the "word solution", I think is better for long document, and the last solution ( textarea with javascript ) for small notes. I think that I'll give both the ways. If you get some new could you let me know? Thanks Darvin -----Original Message----- From: Mike Flynn [SMTP:mike@mikeflynn.net] Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 5:25 PM To: php-windows@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP-WIN] Is it possible to CONVERT file formats? Hey all, We are trying to develop a system to allow people to upload meeting minutes from our organization's meetings. We'd like to assume no HTML knowledge on the user's part. The easiest method would be to ask them just to upload plain text, or to upload their MS Word file (as they do now) and hope everyone can read MS Word. Ideally, however, I'd like to be able to allow them the niceities of HTML (bold, italic, underline, big, small) without any specific file format. Are there any systems in place to take a file such as a basic Word file and convert its text (roughly) to HTML? Not a whole HTML page, like as if you exported it to HTML from Word, just the text and its properties. If anyone knows of anything like this, it would be great. Thanks! -Mike Flynn Come the millennium month 12, in the home of the greatest power, the village idiot will come forth to be acclaimed the leader. (Nostradamus, 1555) I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes. (George W. Bush, 2000) -- PHP Windows Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-windows-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-windows-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net