[Techtalk] Gimp tutorials

[Miriam English]

Maria McKinley wrote:
> The other problem with html is it just isn't that easy to write. I can take
> a document that I write in pretty much any editor, and pretty easily
> convert it to pdf, but there is no easy way to take that same document and
> convert it to html.

That's strange. I would have said exactly the opposite.

I write my stories in a plain old text editor and run it through a 
simple filter of my own devising that htmlizes it.

Alternatively, there are a few ways of using markdown -- a simplified 
technique of indicating styles in a text document developed largely from 
how wikis indicate styling. I dabbled with that for a while, but I 
prefer my own filter.

I used to write in "Composer" (the html-editing part of Mozilla's 
Seamonkey, descended from the editor in the old Netscape Navigator Gold, 
if anybody remembers that). I still use it if I want to do a quick 
copy-paste from a wordprocessor or a webpage into an html document while 
retaining the text styles. It is not as efficient as a simple filter, 
but it is a good way of quickly copying text+styles+images over. And it 
is easy to tweak afterwards. Composer is far more powerful than it first 
seems. It has a very simple layout that allows surprisingly complex use.

Most wordprocessors can save as html format, though the result is 
usually horrendously overloaded with superfluous tags. Microsoft word is 
by far the worst in this respect, though OpenOffice and LibreOffice are 
terrible too. AbiWord is still bad, but less so. KWord is brilliant, 
producing the cleanest html of any wordprocessor I've ever seen.

Best wishes,

	- Miriam

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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