Preparing Word Perfect
documents
for Publishing to the World Wide Web
Still in
development, after all these years...
Intended for faculty in the Language
Studies Department at USNA as a guide to regulations and
recommended procedures for creating and posting web pages and
resources to our web site. Some of the information found here
may be useful to others as well.
Why Weblish?
- Access: available when relevant, 24-hour a day, world-wide
(if desired), absentees
- Economy: updatable (so works in progress can be made
available), save trees, avoid printing out extras "just
in case" for losers / absentees
- Painless incorporation and distribution of non-print
media (audio, video, software)
- Through links, easily, legally incorporate materials
elsewhere
What materials may be posted on USNA's
website?
Please refer to detailed
guidelines at http://www.usna.edu/InfoTech/guidelines.html.
Excerpts:
For Page Developers /
Maintainers
1. Observe USNA, DON, and DOD policies, summarized below:
(a) Pages must be mission related
(b) Pages must be tasteful and in compliance with ethics and
honor codes
(c) Pages must not contain classified, sensitive, or privacy act
data
(d) Pages must not use copyrighted material without permission
(e) Pages must not contain advertising or solicitations
(f) Pages must not imply government approval of commercial
products
(g) Information must be professionally presented
(h) Each page must have a POC identified
2. Learn to make pages efficient and useful guidelines
available through http://www.usna.edu/InfoTech/guidelines.html.
Other valuable guidance is available from various locations on
the WWW using pointers accessed from: http://www.usna.edu/InfoTech/html.html.
3. When in doubt whether information should be released to the
general public, seek guidance from the JAG office or PAO. Consult
with the webmaster for the server you are using for details on
how to restrict such information to USNA.
If you are pointing to sites off the Yard, include a
disclaimer :
The following links are to sites that are not located
at the United States Naval Academy. The USNA is not
responsible for the content found on these sites. In addition,
the content of these sites does not reflect the opinions,
standards, policy or endorsement of the Naval Academy or the
United States Government.
What procedures should I follow to
Weblish a document?
- Produce your original document with any word processor.
The most comfortable way will probably be to use Word
Perfect, following the steps below.
- Advantage: familiarity, single source for web and
print document
- Disadvantage: legacy documents may require
signicant reformatting; new documents subject to
limitations of HTML documents
- Export as HTML (if your word processor permits) or RTF
document (to convert with Netscape or Internet Explorer
HTML editors)
- If WP-produced, DeWP to remove obnoxious formatting (too
many line breaks, wide columns, double bullets in
unordered lists...)
- DeWP is a simple program which removes the most
annoying formatting which WP introduces into your
document when you export it.
- Click here to download DeWP.exe.
Save it to any directory where you can find it
later.
- To use it, drag and drop the file(s) to be
ameliorated onto DeWP.exe or a shortcut to it.
- Alternatively, add a shortcut to DeWP.exe to your
"Send To" menu, then select files to be
treated and right-click, > Send to... >DeWP
- To add a shortcut to your "Send To"
menu, go to C:\Windows\SendTo, right-click, New
> Shortcut > (browse or type in path to
DeWP.exe)
- Use LangHTML (an ambitious project I abandoned since
almost non one in the department develops web pages) to
add headers, link buttons, required footers, descriptions
and keywords
- Submit the HTML document to departmental Webmaster to be
reviewed for compliance with DoD and USNA policy, to
preserve uniformity of style, and to ensure the integrity
of the Website.
- The most efficient way to submit a document is as
an attachment to e-mail. You can right-click on
the name of the file, choose "Send to...
Mail Recipient"
- Provide guidance as to where it fits into the
site organization, a text for the link (about 10
words max.), and a brief description (1-2 lines)
of the document to follow the link
- For example, is it a course file for all
Spanish students (e.g. my handout on
names of courses taught at USNA), all FS200
students (e.g. general rules of Spanish
grammar), all FS201 students (e.g. the
syllabus or an exam review sheet), or
only for Prof Fletcher's students (e.g. a
specific course assignment)
- If it is an update of a page currently available
on our site, let me know.
- Provide any resources (graphics, sounds, videos)
as e-mail attachments
- Inform me of any access restrictions that must be
imposed (currentl options: USNA addresses only vs.
entire world)
- When I have reviewed, perhaps amended, and
uploaded your document, I will let you know its
URL and which pages have links to it. Please
verify that the file is accessible and displays
as you intended it to as soon as feasible after
sending it to me.
- If you request, I can also notify ALL students in
a given course of its availability.
- Additional author's responsibilities
- Make any subsequent changes to the on-line
HTML version of your page (either via WP or
Netscape / IE)
- Let me know when a document should be inactivated
or retired
- Inactive documents are not currently
accessible, but are retained on the
server, and links to them will be
preserved but simply hidden on the
linking page; they can then be
reactivated with minimal effort.
Appropriate for any document which is
expected to be used again within a year.
- Retired documents will be deleted from
server, and all references to them will
be removed from the linking page.
Appropriate for any documents you do not
expect to use again in the same form. You
are responsible for retaining a copy of
the file in its final form in case you
decide to reactivate it.
Conceptual Map of
Language Studies Website
Top Level: Language Studies Home Page, with links to
all subsections listed here
- Course-related materials (organized in hierarchy: all
languages, individual language, specific level of course,
specific course, specific instructor)
- Syllabi
- Handouts
- Software downloads
- Language-learning tools (CharPad, Flasher)
- Other learning and research resources (organized in
hierarchy general / multiple language, specific language
area, specific topic, specific country)
- Language, culture, media, travel links
- Research links: libraries, professional
organizations, teaching resources
- Guides to using internet and internet tools (browser,
search engines, etc.)
- Cox Fund and Zipf Scholarship
- Departmental Information
- Faculty and Staff List (name, rank, languages,
phone, office, e-mail)
- Faculty profiles, publications and
research interests, on-line papers (none
offered by other faculty so far)
- Mission and department resources
- Course Descriptions
- Technology in language instruction at USNA
- Links for faculty
- Windows 95 and new computer training and
reference
- USNA Administrative links (class lists, schedule,
catalogs, USNA instructions)
- Web development tools and reference links
HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
- HTML consists of "Tags" added to your page to
inform the user's browser about the logical organization,
format, media resources, and links required for that page.
Tags are enclosed in < > and are usually
paired, with </ > turning a given feature off.
For example, the tag for boldface is <B>. This
code
Here is some <B>boldface type.</B>
displays as
Here is some boldface type.
Suggestion: to view the "Raw" HTML
behind a page, click "View Source" in your
browser.
- Hyperactive means Jumpy
- Links to related information
- Non-linear approach to information
presentation
- Unnecessary to remember long /
unforgiving URLs
- Access only what's needed when relevant.
- HTML imposes some restrictions
- Must accommodate variety of platforms and screen
sizes, from text-only Linx (as on Nadn) to full
GUI browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer,
at different screen resolutions
- User's personal preferences can override author's
(color, font)
- On-line distro is different for those with slow
connections (most of Bancroft Hall), which limits
quantity of graphics, audio, video that is is
feasible to include.
Producing Documents for
the Web
Prerequisites
- Some fluency in Win95 building blocks and techniques
- Experience reading web pages to know what works and what
doesn't
- Familiarity with and willingness to develop proficiency
in WPWin
Tools to develop Win95 and WP skills
Practical Agenda: Mini-review of Word Perfect 8
- Practice basic operations in Word Perfect
- Opening a file
- Ctrl-O or
- File Menu > Open or
- Opening Folder
icon on top
left of toolbar and
- Saving a file
- Ctrl-S or
- File Menu > Save or
- Diskette Icon
at top left
of toolbar
- Formatting text
- Creating and modifying tables
- Learn to export documents to HTML
- First, save original as Word Perfect document
- Toggle page / web view with toolbar icon
(about
1/3 from right-hand side of toolbar) to see what
your document will look like
- Alternatively, click on File Menu >
Internet Publisher > Format as Web Document
- To save the file, use either
- File Menu > Send To > HTML
to save a copy of the file in HTML format.
- File Menu > Save As...
and specify File Type: HTML.
A "plain" save will
overwrite your original WP document with
potential concomitant loss of formatting,
and the resulting document cannot be
opened by HTML editors or browsers.
-
- Creating new HTML documents
- Click on File Menu > New and
select "New Word Perfect Web Document";
this gives you a handy button bar at the left of
the screen to help you with special web-page
formatting
- Alternatively, click on File Menu >
Internet Publisher > Create a Web Document
- Sending documents by e-mail and LangHTML.
Gotchas
- When you are using a document file in Word Perfect, it is
not available to any other program. This means you cannot
view it in Netscape, send it as an e-mail attachment etc.
until you close the document in Word Perfect.
- Format elements that do not transfer properly
from WP to HTML
- Extra spaces, tabs / indentations, columns: for
layout use tables
instead (Insert > Table... ; choose
numbers of columns across plus number of row or
lines down you need)
- Footnotes (I have a partial workaround)
- Extra line feeds (WP is too generous; that's one
of the purposes of DeWP)
- Headers and footers
- Page breaks
- Format elements that survive transfer from WP to HTML
- Centering and block indentation
- Bold, underline, italic, larger fonts (for
legibility's sake, avoid long passages in italics
or underlines; avoid block of text in all
capitals)
- Foreign characters
- Tables for columar / tabular display of text and
graphics (but WP likes to stretch the tables out
to fill the whole width of the screen, one of the
quirks which DeWP corrects)
- Observe these conventions and regulations
- Skip a line between paragraphs
- Remove any page numbers and headers / footers
from body of text
- For longer documents, put an index of section
headings before the body of the text, then insert
links to the sections. Alternatively, separate
into a set of shorter pages
- To establish authorship, you may wish to include
a copyright notice and restrictions on use at the
end (e.g. © 1998 by I. M. Erudite. All Rights
Reserved. US law no longer requires registration
for a copyright to be valid.)
- If you include copyright materials (graphics,
audio, video, software, any published materials,
including your own work, unless copyright was
assigned to you personally), be sure to obtain
written permission from the copyright holder
specifying that the materials may be made freely
available (or with availability restricted to
USNA if required) on the Web.
- For guidance on fair-use principles for
excerpting longer copyrighted work for inclusion
in instructional materials restricted to local
access, please refer to these sources:
Copyright & Fair Use:
Academic Guidance and Policy Statements
Style Sheet:
Requirements and Recommendations for Pages Posted on our Site
In development!
- Filenaming Conventions
- Each web-page author in our department has a
directory on the web server identified by her
last name in all lower case. Materials restricted
to access at USNA are kept in a subdirectory
called "local". For example,
all materials produced by Prof. Jones which have
unrestricted access have the URL path http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/jones/,
while those with restricted access reside in http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/jones/local/
- Consequently, each file produced by a web author
must have a unique descriptive name to avoid
overwriting existing files.
- Take advantage of Windows 95 long filenames to
identify files meaningfully, preferably with
words spelled out rather abbreviated.
- You may include capital and lower-case letters to
divide sequences of words visually, e.g. SpanishPreteriteImperfect.html.
Disadvantage: this makes URLs more difficult to
enter correctly. (The easiest to remember is all
lower case, with words separated by underscore _
(the most frequent) or else hyphen - or period .
(easier to enter).
- Any spaces in Win95 filenames must be replaced by
underscore, hyphen, period, or nothing to conform
to the the UNIX server's filenaming conventions,
e.g. spanish preterite imperfect.html
will appear as spanish_preterite_imperfect.html.
- All HTML files will have the full suffix .html
in lower-case letters.
- Headers, footers, link blocks
- Responsibilities / POC
- Graphics / video / audio & copyright
- Uploading / No midshipman access except by approval of
Language Studies Webmaster.
Images
Additional Links
EDITED BY: AssocProf William H. Fletcher,
Language Studies Dept., US Naval Academy
REVISION: 15 May 2000
URL: http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/WPtoW3.html