WebWorks Publisher 2003 for Word
Summary | Starting a project | Customisation and tweaking | Other points
I evaluated this product by downloading a 21-day trial version from the Quadralay web site. If you want to get this for yourself, be prepared to wait for 33,839,832 bytes to be transferred. The trial package includes a Word file suitable for converting to dynamic HTML and a short tutorial. As you might imagine, you can convert Quadralay's sample Word file in no time at all. Although this first taste is unrealistically trouble-free, it gives you a chance to understand the basic process for working with Publisher.
When you install Publisher, Word's menu bar acquires a new WebWorks menu, which I'll describe later in this review. For my evaluation, I worked with Word 2000 on my test machine, but I also converted some files that I had prepared with Word XP.
Follow the wizard
Whenever you want to convert a set of Word documents to an online format, you must create a new Publisher project. A project is the collection of input files that Publisher needs for the conversion. Publisher offers you one project template for each of target format, and you can also create your own templates projects.
Publisher's New Project Wizard, leads you through the initial steps. You:
- Select a template for your target online format
- Name your project and assign it to a directory
- Choose one source Word document you want to convert (You can add other documents to the project later.)
Then comes the most important part of preparing the generation process. You map the styles in your Word document to the Publisher styles in the project you selected. Each template project includes enough predefined styles to make your initial conversion reasonably successful. The following picture shows how you carry out this mapping using the wizard.
The Source Style column lists all the paragraph styles that Publisher has found in your source Word document. If a Word style and a Publisher style share the same name, Publisher maps them automatically (see the highlighted Heading3 entry mapped By Name in the previous picture), but you can override this mapping.
At this stage in your work, it is not important to map the styles with total accuracy. When you are satisfied with your initial attempt, you follow a couple more wizard screens before choosing Finish to trigger the generation process.
When the generation is complete, Publisher shows you all the components of your project, which now includes some generated files, in the project window. The example below shows the results of converting a single Word file to dynamic HTML. The elements in a project depend on the target format that you have selected.
From this window, you can open up the files Publisher has generated. You will probably not be totally satisfied with the appearance of you online publication, and you might also want to add to other Word documents to the project. So now you need to refine the project and re-generate the online files. What you actually do at this stage depends on your knowledge of your source files and Publisher's various options. With a good understanding, you can quickly improve the generated output. However, if you are new to Publisher, the wealth of options can be overwhelming. In the following section of this article, I give a overview of some of options available.
When you are finally satisfied with your online publication, you will probably want to make it available to others by copying all the relevant files another a directory or folder, usually on a server. Publisher assists this task with its Deployment Wizard.
Summary | Starting a project (top) | Customisation and tweaking | Other points
Copyright © 2003 Stephen P. Reynolds. All rights reserved.
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