Hands-On Self-Training: Lesson 3
Convert a WordPerfect document to a Web page

A basic fact of Internet life here at TNRCC and elsewhere is that much information is already stored in computer files. However, it is stored in a variety of computer file formats--wordprocessor formats, database formats, spreadsheet formats, email formats. For use in or as Web pages, such content must generally be converted into HTML format. (The benefit is that HTML pages are hardware-platform and software-product independent—anyone with a Web browser can read an HTML page.)

Converting information from WordPerfect to HTML is a very typical sort of task for a Web author here. Doing the conversion manually is possible but is tedious at best. (First you need to save the WP document as an ASCII (DOS) text file, thus stripping out all WP formatting, and then you add HTML tags to restore much of that formatting....)

There are various software tools to aid in HTML conversion, but the one that can deal best with WP files is the one geared specifically to WP to HTML translation, Internet Publisher. In WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, Internet Publisher is an add-on. In WordPerfect 8.0 (for Windows95), Internet Publisher is an integrated part of WordPerfect (it's accessible from the File menu.

No HTML converter is perfect, and Internet Publisher is no exception. Still, WordPerfect's converter handles many of the basics for you "effortlessly." You can then take the .htm file it outputs and fix what it didn't handle properly.

For that tuning, you can either continue to work in WordPerfect, using special WPIP menu commands or toolbar buttons—in that case, you will never actually see any HTML tags—or else you can resort to your HTML editor or ASCII text editor of choice.

One special challenge for those of you whose WordPerfect documents contain special symbols (like Texas Administrative Code rule documents with section symbols) is how to reproduce those special characters in HTML. Fortunately, there are references on the Web on character entities and numeric character entities.

Even though more and more software tools are out there that make HTML coding transparent (invisible) to a Web author, there's something to be said for learning at least the basics of HTML coding. HTML is a programming language, but it is not rocket science, and it's through direct coding that you'll have the most understanding of what you are doing and the most control over the resulting Web pages.

And even though this lesson has focused on WordPerfect's means for "automating" some of the process of converting a file from WordPerfect format to HTML, you may find it simpler to just do the conversion yourself, cutting and pasting content from a WP file into an HTML file.

OK. Enough talk. Now try your hand at the steps outlined below.

• Run WordPerfect.
• Select a WP document to convert. (For greatest challenge, choose one that includes one or more tables.)
• Open and print the WP document (so you'll have a copy to look at while working on it).
• With WordPerfect 8, choose File, Internet Publisher, Publish to HTML. Go with the defaults on directory and file name.
• Open the resulting .htm file, specifying type as ASCII DOS Text. You'll see all the tags and content.
• Alternatively, open the resulting .htm file as type HTML. You won't see the tags, and you can see what you can do with WordPerfect's WYSIWYG HTML editor.
• View results in Netscape: Choose File, Open File.
• Attempt to fix things that didn't convert properly, updating the .htm file.
  • Check for special characters
  • Check table structures
  • Add bullets to list
  • Experiment with type.
  • Change the background color to white (bgcolor="#ffffff").
  • Put alignment parameters in your table row and table data tags.
• View the updated Web page file on your hard drive in Netscape: Choose File, Open File.
• FTP your file to the Web server and view it in again in Netscape: Choose File, Open Location.
• Repeat the last two steps as needed, remembering to Reload the page each time you view it in Netscape after saving a new copy.