How to keep formatting when pasting from Pages 09 into Dreamweaver CS4

Question

How to keep formatting when pasting from Pages 09 into Dreamweaver CS4

I have about 1000 Word files that I copy from and paste into Dreamweaver. When I paste from Word, I am able to maintain the formatting that was in Word (Headers, Paragraphs, bold, italics, and superscript). All I have to do is remove the inline HTML font definitions that Word insists on carrying over.

I'm trying to whine myself from Office and want to use Pages for this task. Unfortunately, pasting from Pages does not retain the formatting. I am using styles in Pages like I am in Word. I've tried changing the names of my styles to make the HTML labels (H4, P, OL, etc) but this doesn't work either.

Any ideas?

Mirror Drive G4, MacTel iMac, MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Feb 6, 2010 5:07 AM

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Answer 1

Jon Walker

Level 6

19,489 points

Feb 6, 2010 6:20 AM in response to Merged Content 1

Any ideas?

Don't use Dreamweaver myself, but do convert Pages projects to HTML/XHTML for pre-processing as ePub content. In my work flow, I just open a new TextEdit document as Rich text, copy/paste my Pages content to the TextEdit document window, and export the pasted content as HTML/XHTML files. Unfortunately, while the CSS formatting looks about the same on the screen, it appears that TextEdit does not support the header tags (H1 - H6) and changes them to P/S tags. Thus the first thing I normally do when I import the HTML/XHTML file into the target WYSIWYG HTML editor is to redefine header values to match my original settings in Pages and re-apply the H tags as needed/required to be automatically recognized as Title, author, TOC entries, etc. in the ePub creation software. If all you are interested in is the CSS "look" in Dreamweaver and not actually having the H tags themselves, then this step may be unnecessary for your work flow. In addition, note that image transfers can be problematical so I normally just transfer the text via this work flow and add the images/artwork separately to the HTML editor or ePub creator. Also, any floating objects, text box content, etc. may have to be copy/pasted independently from the word processor layer between Pages and TextEdit.

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Answer 2

Feb 6, 2010 6:41 AM in response to Jon Walker

copy/paste my Pages content to the TextEdit document window, and export the pasted content as HTML/XHTML files.

That works, but it's a lot of extra work for something Dreamweaver shouldn't stumble on. I still have to remove inline formatting that Textedit and/or Pages inserts. It looks like I am going to have to experiment with saving the pertinent text to a Word file and then use Dreamweaver to import it. Still more work than I would like, but better than having to format all of it Dreamweaver.

Ruff!

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