Word to Deki Publishing Plugin

Status

This feature is not yet publicly available.

Introduction

Currently, there are installable buttons that allow direct publishing from Microsoft Outlook and allow direct uploading from Microsoft Windows machines to MindTouch Deki. There exists a need, however, for an easy-to-use client-side plugin that allows for one-click publishing from Microsoft Word directly to Deki. FCKEditor has functionality for copying and pasting Word documents, but there is no existing functionality available for one-click publishing from within Word.

Functionality Overview

The concept would be similar to the plugin for Microsoft Outlook; a "Publish" button would be installed to a toolbar within Word, appearing something like this:

This button will take the current document, and publish it to Deki using the name of the document as the page title within the wiki. Any images from within the document would automatically be uploaded to that page of the wiki as well, allowing the wiki page to maintain the same layout as the Word document.

Concerns/Considerations

Converting Word documents to XHTML tends to require pre- or post-processing to deal with the large number of tags created by Word. The MindTouch Deki Word plugin will have to strip the excess tags out, inserting tags where necessary, to maintain the original layout of the document. It will have to be decided as to whether inline styles get extracted out into a stylesheet, or whether they will remain inside the document in the wiki.

The plugin will likely be able to publish documents to a path other than the user's path (e.g., specify a destination path rather than default to the user's path on the wiki). It would also be ideal to add multi-document publishing functionality to the plugin, as well as the ability to publish a document directly to the wiki as an attachment.