Gadgetopia

When Word-to-XML Conversion Get Nasty: A good, solid look at Word conversions which drives home an important point: a conversion is as good as the construction of the underlying Word document. If the author used styles well, then it’s not so bad. But if the author ran rampant with the font menu, you’re in for a rough time.

Like most publishing tools, Word provides users with elegant ways to produce their documents. Features such as style templates, paragraph formats, and table editors make it easy to give documents a consistent appearance, so, in a large part, the ease of conversion will be a function of how well document authors have followed any such guidelines in producing their documents. Consistently-styled Word documents, as well as simple documents (such as memos) can be fairly straightforward to convert.