Ruby on Rails: In there a way to convert word to html?

Question

maybe a way to batch convert also?

Answer 1

The short answer is no, but the long answer is sorta.

MS Word itself will save a file out as html - but it's a total friggin' mess. To an extent this is simply because the customer base that is converting word files to html directly are not concerned about it being sloppy, so Word hasn't worked hard on making a clean output. On the other hand, it's intrinsically difficult, because word is oriented to create fixed size, non-dynamic documents, like a paper-base book. So it's easy to convert to other static formats (say a PDF), but how do you convert to HTML? Do you just make the text flow across? Do you set a width that will hopefully make the layout stay the same? What if there is fonts or layout elements in the word doc that are not available in the HTML renderer?

The easiest thing to do is to do it project by project - you can create a DTD to convert an RTF file, for instance - but this involves you making programmer level decisions about how these will be converted.

Answer 2

You could use Google Docs API to upload and convert .doc's.

http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html

Some samples and code: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/code.html

Ruby example and demo: http://code.google.com/p/gdata-samples/source/browse/#svn/trunk/doclist/DocListManager http://doclistmanager.googlecodesamples.com/