RE: HUGE price rise, format conversions, and HTML Transit
- why would you want to make a personal investment in a product whose makers
seem to be repositioning to the corporate market?
Good question. Short answer: about 98% of my customers are in the corporate market. Longer answer: Short answer, + if the product is good value for money (including payback time and ongoing cost of upgrades) to me, why would I care where the makers think they should position it?
- its hard to answer your question directly because you don't really talk
about your requirements in any detail.
If low volume conversion of Word content to HTML is a major requirement,
there are a number of ways that can be done with either free utilities or
shareware products. One option, for example, would be to Save as HTML and
then run the freeware Tidy utility against the result. You can find Tidy at
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/.
My original post might have been misleading. I wrote to the list partly to warn of the ludicrously extreme price rises, and partly to ask if current users had any problems or issues with the product. Everyone I've heard from is using it for Word to HTML; nobody mentioned any gotchas; everyone said they wouldn't be upgrading.
For me, the tool might generate the requirement. Until last week all I knew about HTML Transit was that it converts Word to HTML better than the Word Save as function. Big deal. But I've now seen a little bit of the product on a client site, read a bit on the website, and talked with a couple of document management solutions providers who include Transit and Transit Central in their product offerings. I'm thinking that there might be enough potential for one off legacy document conversions from multiple formats, and for setting up templates and procedures for updating low volatility sites, to justify a $500 semi-speculative investment before the price explodes.
Of course, avoiding Word entirely for content creation can be a bracing,
refreshing experience. I've made a personal investment in the latest version
of WordPerfect Office 2000 solely for the pretty decent XML editing
environment. While earlier versions of WP were pretty wonky and unstable,
I've found this version to be very reliable and there are more ways, i.e.,
format conversions, in and out of WP than most any other desktop tool. That
said, the HTML conversion filter does add some of its own twists and shouts
(but not to the extent of Word).
Ed, I'm interested and pleased to hear that you're having good results with WP. It used to be a really good product: it'll be nice if it can stage a comeback.
Sandra Charker
mailto:scharker -at- connectives -dot- com
Personal web site: http://www.connectives.com
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