Easy way to have users copy and past formatted docs into nuk

Private Joined: Sep 24, 2003 Posts: 45

Hiya all:

I have a group of users who are given admin permissions. These admins have 0 computer knowledge other than typical users stuff. Microsoft Word Excel PPT etc..

They have the task of converting all our old Word Docs into our new Nuke Site as articles.

We have tried using 3 different WySIWYG Editors and although they work great for newly designed articles they are very poor at accepting pre-formated documents unless they are first converted to pure text, which then looses all the formating.

Has anyone else dealt with a similar problem and come up with a solution? I am new to PHP code but willing to sit down and write and or play with it as I have some coding back ground.

I had thought of trying to find a way to integrate the Forums editors into the Nuke Articles section but not sure if thats the right way to go either.

Captain Joined: Oct 26, 2003 Posts: 531

I'm relatively new to phpnuke, so this suggestion might not work in the environment.

If the users are used to Word, have them save the documetn as HTML and then open the HTML file in notepad or something so they can cut and paste the source into your article.

Just a thought. My curiosity has been piqued and I'll play with it tonight myself.

- Virgil

Private Joined: Sep 24, 2003 Posts: 45

It sort of works in Office 2k and 97 but it doesnt work in xp.

Reason is that windows dumps tons of crap into the back end of the document that when you try and copy and past the editing window doesnt know how to deal with it.

The other problem is the fonts. If you dont use a font pre-recognized by the editor (Nuke or other WySWIWYG) then it will not work at all either because it simply doesnt recognize the font.

The other problem that I have is most of the "Articles" that will be done by our staff are technical in nature. They have tables and all sorts of junk in them. We would put them into a PDF or WORD and have downloaded but then it reduces the searchability of the website because it can no longer search full text of the articles because they are not part of the text based document, that being PHP Nuke. Instead we have to create Key Words and that can be a hit or miss for some users.

Private Joined: Dec 27, 2003 Posts: 45

Hi! As we are talking here about users with 0 knowledge I have the same problem too. My admins don't know html and i have written a detailed FAQ about this but still they expirience troubles.... So I want to ask is there any way to make Nuke use for formatting text the Meta language used in forums like

Code:

[code][/code], [b][/b],[url][/url],...

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jan 12, 2004 Posts: 7

I suppose you're using the content-module?

When I tried to work some docs into the content module, I tried also to use html to make it all clean and nice. This all goes with so much pain, and toothgrinding, that I decided to use the included phpbb-forum for large texts. Didn't see a page-option yet, for large texts. But anchors work fine for me, till I figured something out.

html-tags can be easily allowed in the forum-config. So, when word makes this extra html-mess, I can clean it up easily with dreamweaver "clean html"option.

Don't know if that helps...

jeroen

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jan 21, 2004 Posts: 4

It depends what WYSIWYG editor you are using.

The one I use, and for most other versions WYSIWYG editors, I believe, has a button to show HTML tags. The only thing your user needs to do is, click that button to switch to HTML (plain text) mode before paste the document from MS Word. When formatted text from Word is pasted into this plain text editor, all formatting codes are removed automatically. Switching back to WYSIWYG editing mode (by clicking the "SHOW HTML TAG" button again, it brings you back to the formatting panel then you can format as it is a fresh plain text.

Remeber to put extra blank line between paragraphs before swtiching. Otherwise all text will become one single paragraph.

Try this. It works for me.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Feb 29, 2004 Posts: 1

I have found that in phpnuke 7.0 with the WYSIWYG EDITOR 700b3 for PHPNUKE Version 7.0 (based in the Spaw code), you have the posibility to paste text from a word document including tables and formatting and after that you can directly clean the pasted text with the HTML cleanup tool, this removes the word extra code and leaves pure html compatible code, the format is slightly modified but the result is very similar to original, great tool.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Feb 14, 2004 Posts: 2

Well, I use Frontpage.

I paste the text in preview mode, then goto HTML and just take the section between the [body] marks.

Works fine, exept for fonts...