[thelist] Word to HTML

[Michael Galvin]

The 'Am I being BSed' post on this list reminded me of something I thought
of during work today.  One of our clients creates a montly e-zine, in Word.
There's no formatting, etc on this file, but we've convinced them to make it
a little prettier at least as we're about to give users of their site the
option to direct download these files.

Anyway, as an aside, they also have a small mailing list of people to whom
they send this newsletter.  Up to now, they've been cutting from Word,
pasting into a mail message and sending it off.  Line breaks are atrocious,
there's no formatting whatsover and it just looks very unprofessional.

They'd like to move to more formatted HTML email (disregarding people on the
list who don't view HTML email) and to that end, I created a template for
them, but of course, it's a little dodgy as they have to be sure to get the
headings, contents, etc into the right place at the right time, every time,
otherwise it'll go a little screwy.  So, I suddenly thought why not just
save the Word file as a HTML file, and yes, the HTML is awful and about 20
times more than is required, but in the case of HTML email, wouldn't it be
okay?

If so, is there anything I should be aware of?  I'm thinking in particular
the width of the email - in my template, I put in TABLE WIDTH=500 to cover
most email windows (yeah, I'm sure there are better ways of dealing with
that) -- would they have to put their own tables into the Word doc?  Would
formatting come out okay?  Lots of questions, and probably only one real way
to answer them -- try it myself.  I'd just like to know of any potential
issues before I get to it tomorrow.

Michael