RTF2HTML reigns supreme for converting RTF to USEABLE HTML.

Review by Richard Brown

My situation...

Needing to go from Adobe InDesign to the Web, given its solutions are worse than cludgy, and that GoLive makes wretchedly incompatible HTML, a person is forced, short to hand coding, to use a program which generates decent HTML. All other joking attempts aside, this leaves only one choice: Dreamweaver.

Exporting Rich Text Format is available everywhere these days, and this allows documents with unearthly amounts of italics and boldface to be brought to the web. Like the Newsletter I produce for Tropic Star Lodge.

So out goes thousands of complexly bolded and italicized words with tons of foreign characters as RTF from InDesign, which killed off Quark for many users from early OSX arrogance.

Now, in my first go-round with this spicy RTF, I jumped unwillingly into Word. All the formatting stayed put, and word can output a dreadful thing called "Word HTML."

However, while Dreamweaver offers to "Import Word HTML" it does so quite unsuccessfully, leaving foreign characters, accented vowels and such unresolved.

Worse, Dreamweaver also keeps all the Word specific fonts and other such formating which originally came from InDesign, making very difficult to edit, monolithic HTML even AFTER using Dreamweaver's "Clean Up Word HTML" Command.

RTF2HTML to the RESCUE...

So, with HTML that will be a disaster across the various browsers and platforms on the Web, I go to find a solution on MacUpdate.

RTF2HTML is the answer to ANYONE who needs to translate complex formatting to the Web.

Using a great program like TexEdit Plus to suck in the RTF, I just selected all, copied, and pasted the text into RTF2HTML's top window, clicked "Convert," and lo and behold, perfect, universally accceptable HTML code appeared in RTF2HTML's translation window.

This HTML is perfect from the get go... Gone are all the useless font and peculiar formatting. Copy THIS HTML to Dreamweaver... (Make a new file, in code view find under find the text , highlight that with the mouse, and paste the code from RTF2HTML.

Now, if you are in code/design view, just click on the design (lower) part of the window to update... BINGO... PERFECT HTML, easily editable in design mode or code mode, without the surfeit problems of passing ANYTHING past a Microsoft product like Word.

Now my editing is a breeze, and you can see the result shortly on Tropic Star's website.