Generating HTML

When you are ready to create the actual HTML file (.HTM), select Generate HTML from the HTML Author menu or click on the Generate HTML button in the HTML Author toolbar. By default, the name of the HTML file will be the same as that of the source file, but with the .DOC extension replaced by .HTM. HTML Author will give you a chance to change this if required. For multi-file documents, the name of the top level file is defined in this way.

The document title is obtained from the first paragraph of the document if that paragraph has the Title style. Otherwise, the title is taken from the title field in the Word document Summary Information. The summary information may be inspected and modified using the File|Summary Info command.

If you cancel the Generate HTML macro by pressing the escape key whilst generation of HTML is in progress, you may be left in the window containing the partly converted HTML file. You may close this window in the normal way and return to the source document.

If invalid structures are encountered during the HTML generation, HTML Author will place a comment in the HTML file indicating the nature of the error. In these circumstances, a warning will appear after the generation has been completed.

(Note. For large documents, especially if you are using a 386 computer, please be patient. On my 25MHz 386SX portable, it takes over 3 minutes to generate the HTML for this manual. It goes a lot quicker on a 486 DX2/50 mind you!)

Character Translation

Some special characters appearing in the normal text of the document (i.e. not hidden text) are converted to HTML escape sequences so that they will be reproduced literally by the HTML viewer. The characters that are currently handled are: & © < > à á â ã ä å ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ñ ò ó ô õ ö ø ù ú û ü À Á Â Ã Ä Å Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù Ú Û Ü. Text that is formatted with the As Is style will not be converted in this way. To save time during HTML generation, this option can be turned on or off, for a particular document, in the Options dialogue box. The default setting for new documents may also be specified in the same dialogue box.

Document Background and Colours

You may modify the document background for the HTML files generated by using the Background and Colours command from the HTML Author menu. This allows you to specify a picture to be used as the background in the form of a .GIF image file. This dialogue box also supports the specification of various colours as used and supported by Netscape.

Colours that may be specified are shown in Table 2.

To specify a colour, you must insert a six digit Hexadecimal number into the appropriate field in the dialogue box. Each pair of digits in this number represents the strength of one of the primary colours (red, green and blue) in the form: RRGGBB. Thus, for example, white will be represented by FFFFFF, black by 000000, green by 007F00 and bright green by 00FF00. HTML Author will check the validity of the codes you type in when you press the OK button or the Set Defaults button.

The set defaults button places the current values of all the fields in the dialogue box into the HTMLAUTH.INI file. These values will be applied by default to any new documents that are created with the HTMLAUTH.DOT template. The defaults may be retrieved into the current dialogue box by pressing the Get Defaults button

NOTES: This feature is not WYSIWYG because it is not possible to change the background in Microsoft Word. The special background and colours will only be visible in the HTML browser. At the time of writing, the background image feature is part of the proposed specification for HTML 3, whereas the colour specification features are specific to Netscape. Other browsers should just ignore the colour specifications.