How do you convert a Word Document into very simple html in Python?

It depends how much formatting and images you're dealing with. I do one of a couple things: Google Docs: Probably the closest you'll get to the original formatting and usable HTML. Markdown: Abandon formatting. Paste it into a plain text editor, run it through Markdown and fix the rest by hand.

You can also use http://www.abisource.com//http://wvware.sourceforge.net/ to convert word document to XHTML and then parse it with http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup//http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm/etc. to preprocess it if you need. In my experience, Abiword does a pretty good job at converting Word files and produce relatively clean XHTML files. I should mention that Abiword can be run on the command line, so it's easy to integrate it in an automated process.

My super-simple app http://wordoff.org/ has an http://wordoff.org/api for cleaning up cruft from Word-exported HTML. You could override the save method of your flatpages model to pipe your HTML through the API the first time it gets saved. Something like this: import urllib import urllib2 def decruft(html): data = urllib.urlencode({'html' : html}) req = urllib2.Request('http://wordoff.org/api/clean', data) response = urllib2.urlopen(req) return response.read() def save(self, **kwargs): if not self.pk: # only de-cruft when content is first added self.content = decruft(self.content) super(FlatPage, self).save(**kwargs)

There are many other approaches, depending on your specific circumstances, beyond the good ones already suggested -- see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/910730/python-ms-word and its answers for a good survey!

Word 2010 has the ability to "save as filtered web page". This will eliminate the overwhelming majority of the HTML that Word inserts. Greg Burdett

I found this web page: http://www.textfixer.com/html/convert-word-to-html.php It converts a formated text to simple HTML markup, preserving bold, italic, links and paragraphs, but not adding tags for font-sizes and faces. Exactly what I needed to save some time.