Information Research Weblog

Why can't Microsoft do decent conversion from Word to xhtml? Their conversion programs are rubbish and don't even take note of properly formatted Word documents using different levels of heading - everything is converted into mindless tags with lots of mso (Microsoft specific) tags. Even the so-called 'filtered' version is crap.

For example, I had a paper recently which had used MSoft conversion: one table had 10,542 characters whereas my 'clean' version had 1,545. I know that file storage is supposed not to be an issue these days, but a ten-fold increase in file sizes would quickly cause problems. One shudders to think what MSoft's implementation of xml in its next version of Office is going to do!