Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with formatting and html

How to replace non-ascii characters with HTML entities?

the latin mouse — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:32:30 -0800

I’m currently working on an international project and need to format documents written in German, Polish and Croatian for use on the web. What is the quickest way to convert all the non-ASCII characters into the relevant character entity? Some sort of web form would be my ideal solution, but I’d settle for a freeware program.

Application to Turn External CSS to Inline

destro — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:56:00 -0800

Is there an online application that will take an HTML page with an external stylesheet and make the styles inline? e.g. style="color:#000000" I run into this a lot for creating newsletters, and would love to have something that could parse it all without me having to do it manually.

Web publishing and paper publishing the same resume without double work?

sdis — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 15:47:37 -0800

I have a resume in Microsoft Word that I use to print and an HTML resume online. Every time I update my resume, I have to do it by hand twice. How do I cut my work in half? Right now I have a resume in Microsoft Word, and am thinking of moving it to Indesign to have better control over the formatting.

I also have hand copied that resume's formatting and content over to my website using a layout grid in Golive (looking at the html generated, it seems to be a bunch of tables, rather than CSS or anything).

Is there any way to just work on this resume in one program? I realize I can export to pdf and link that, but I hate looking at PDFs in a browser, and it just introduces too many problems for potential clients.

I've looked around the MeFi threads about pdf-->html converters or .doc-->html converters that don't cause problems, but haven't found any good options.

I'm on a mac.

Carriage Returns in Excel

godawful — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:02:14 -0800

It's not how I'd choose to spend my Friday evening, but for the last few hours, I've been trying to replace carriage returns that have turned up in an Access and Excel file, and drawing a blank. I've done a thorough search of the archive, and I don't think this has come up before. I've also googled around and looked at specialist forums to no avail.

So, someone's kindly entered the text of about 200 articles into an Access database. They're destined for a website. Each one is paragraphed with what I assume are standard carriage returns which I need to turn into html paragraphs. (Once this is done, I plan to somehow import them articles and their metadata into the right columns of a mysql database.)

At the moment, I'm working on this data in Excel, which was the only way I could find to access it on my Mac. I'm also more au fait with Excel than Access.

I've tried a find and replace on the column of article texts, only to find that there's no way to tell Excel to find a return.

Another horrible hack I thought up was to use 'Text to Columns' using the returns as a delimiter. I could then have inserted tags and concatenated the new columns back together. Again I found no way to specify the return as a delimiter.

I found this note on a way to specify character codes, but I couldnt' make it work in these two cases. Are Mac character codes different?

I tried to use these character codes by adding a column next to the article text column (which is column K) with this formula:
=SUBSTITUTE(K2,CHAR(010),"

")

Again, no dice. It makes no substitutions at all.

Finally, I saved as a .csv, opened it in Textwrangler, and used an appropriate regular expression. It made the changes, but then I couldn't open the file in Excel. Something about a Sylk error.

If there's a simple way to do this in Access that I missed, I could go back to that.

Am I going to have to use VBA? There's a suggestion at the foot of this thread, but I don't know how to make it work.

As always, I'll be very grateful for any help at all.

HTML Resume

Zonker — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 15:27:30 -0800

When submitting a resume in html format, how much formatting is appropriate? Would a bit of embedded CSS be overkill? [Slightly more inside] The position I'm interested in is in no way web design-related, but it's with a fairly web-hip company, so I'm thinking that a valid XHTML document that looks halfway decent wouldn't hurt my chances. I'd appreciate any thoughts the community could offer.