author html for ms word

Question

my objective is to generate HTML markup to target ms word. So far my findings are, if you have all the styles inline to an element, the document, when opened in word renders properly. However it is lengthy task.

<h1 style="font-family:Arial">Inventory</h1>

This is how I try to achieve formatting. If i want to maintain a constant font across the document, in my HTML, I'd have to add font-family to all the elements like I've done above.

Later, I came across a codeproject article. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/office/Wordyna.aspx Now I am sort of convinced that you can declare the styles globally, but the styling language used and the formatting is not like CSS, and, I think its proprietary to ms word document formatting. I am looking for any tutorials/articles for this styling being used.

ps: I am aware about OpenXML etc, etc. I feel its too complex for me to implement at this point.

Answer 1

Word --should-- open valid (read: not Microsoft's proprietary html-ish mess) without fail as it's the rendering engine for Outlook when you open an HTML email. You could go to the effort to build a document entirely in-line (read: only best practice for Microsoft) as we do for HTML emails, but I suspect there are several different ways to skin this cat.

Personally, if I was trying to get a rich text formatted document from html to Word I'd use a tool such as PHPDocX to build a proper word document natively, then if I really wanted Word HTML I could simply hit save on Word. I've had to do similarly with Excel, where it will accept CSV, but the outcome is always better with XLSX, and there's a similar plugin to easily author a proper XLSX document.

If that's too difficult a route (and it's not that bad, trust me) then I'd stick to formatting following HTML Email rules. Simple guides are all over the web, such as here. And, since Outlook 07-current uses Word's html rendering engine, one could deduce that it has the same limitations listed here