|
MangleBracket is an
interactive
Word to
HTML
conversion tool.
Remember when Aperture talked about integrating into your digital RAW workflow? Well MangleBracket
integrates into your web copy workflow — a workflow where you receive a Word document from the copywriter
(or an external client) and convert it to clean generic HTML which can pick up styles from your CSS stylesheets.
The point: The most tedious part of a web developer's job is taking
copy and making html. Instead of copy n' paste and fixing by hand, now you can import your document
into MangleBracket and apply a variety of non-destructive filters to mangle your html exactly
how you want it.
|
It does what you expect
Paragraphs become P, lists become
UL or OL, links become A.
It knows you want cellspacing=0 on your tables. It knows
you use CSS and that you want to discard specific fonts and colors.
Trust MangleBracket.
|
|
It's smart
MangleBracket recovers the appropriate HTML element from the applied style.
A paragraph with a bottom border becomes P + HR. An indented paragraph
becomes BLOCKQUOTE. A paragraph in a large font becomes H1.
If the first row of your table is a different style, it's assumed to be a TH row.
|
|
It's powerful
Every style class, whether it's a named style, an automatic style, or a MangleBracket pseudo style, can
be mapped to any element, with an optional CSS class and/or inline style. In addition, you can map it to two special
elements called (Contents) and (Nothing). Contents strips off the containing tags but renders the contents, and
Nothing omits the entire element and all its children.
|
|
Leave the URLs to the web devs
The copywriter may not know the correct link or image URLs — "Is it ../../index.html or ../../../index.html?"
so he just puts something like "LINK TO PRESS RELEASE" or
"CEO Bio here." MangleBracket warns about hrefs which appear invalid so you can enter a real URL. You can also
decide which links should open in a new window.
|
|
XSLT can't do this
MangleBracket provides unprecedented control over your HTML text output. You can indent with 2 spaces or 4 spaces or
tabs, you can control the indentation style, you can output either HTML or XHTML, and most importantly you can
choose your content encoding with a simple switch of a radio button. UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII, anything
out of range will be encoded with an entity. This means no more unexpected ¿#å debris! To see some
examples, download this Word document which contains various
non-ASCII symbols. If you upload that same document you'll be able to play with the encoding options.
|
|
It's all right there
As you make changes to the settings, your code updates immediately. Switch over to html view and
see your current html rendered in an iframe. You can even paste in your site's CSS, which has zero effect
on the generated output, but it makes
your html view look like it will actually look. That way when you share a link,
whoever is reviewing it won't say but our links are supposed to be orange!
|
|
Don't try it now if you really enjoy:
- Wrapping text in P and LI tags
- Messing with character encoding issues for symbols™, forëign characters, and “smart” quotes
- Searching for placeholder hrefs
- Hand converting a 20 page Word doc only to learn that the copywriter
has an updated Word doc with changes scattered all over the place
- Dealing with the mess of Word's native "Export to HTML"
Resume working on a document
|
