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I’m working with a website that has multiple forms. Whenever I load it into LibreOffice to edit it, it deletes all the form information for all forms but the first one and creates one big master form.
Is there any way to work with multiple tables in HTML in LibreOffice? Or at least a way to keep it form clobbering the forms I’ve already created?
I tried searching but the word "form," even when used with HTML, gave me a high noise to signal ratio.
Hal
So, with nobody saying there’s a way to do this, I take it that it’s just not possible to do multiple forms in HTML documents?
Hal
Hi Hal,
So, with nobody saying there’s a way to do this, I take it that it’s just not possible to do multiple forms in HTML documents?
Probably not, AFAIK even the XML form support is just one page at a
time, and the HTML editor in LibreOffice has always been, well, slightly
crippled.
Alex
Hi 
How about using Bluefish or tinymce or a text-editor?
Word-processors are not ideal for html editing.
Regards from
Tom
I thought I had replied to this, but I don’t see any record of a reply from me.
I’m quite visual, but operate in different "modes." When I’m writing or doing layout design, I *have* to have things simple and intuitive and for layout, I need to see things as I move them around. But once I get into "programming mode," I can deal with HTML directly and have no problem with a more complex text editor or even vi or emacs - but there’s no way I could use one of those while writing!
I’ve looked at Bluefish, but for my initial work, I need a good WYSIWYG setup.
For now, and for the foreseeable future, I’ve decided I’ll use LibreOffice for HTML for the initial version - until I get it looking like I want it. Then I’ll keep two copies of each page I’m working with. On one I’ll use LibreOffice and do the visual editing. Then I open both versions in a text editor as I copy and paste and manually edit the HTML code for the other "live" version with all the form data and so on included.
Overall, yes as Alex says, LibreOffice, as an HTML editor, is crippled. At some point I have a question on another issue I want to post relating to the HTML editor and how converting to HTML can seriously mung the whole layout of an ODT document. (But that’s a whole separate issue.) Unfortunately, Dreamweaver has the market and I don’t want to spend a ton (or, as it is now, a monthly subscription) for it and I can’t find a good HTML editor for OS X for a lower price.
So thanks for the thoughts and comments, everyone. For now I’ll just use my "split" approach and do the visual, then keep the pages separate so I can keep my forms and such intact.
Hal
Hi Hal,
Overall, yes as Alex says, LibreOffice, as an HTML editor, is crippled. At some point I have a question on another issue I want to post relating to the HTML editor and how converting to HTML can seriously mung the whole layout of an ODT document. (But that’s a whole separate issue.) Unfortunately, Dreamweaver has the market and I don’t want to spend a ton (or, as it is now, a monthly subscription) for it and I can’t find a good HTML editor for OS X for a lower price.
I take it that iWeb.app doesn't do what you are looking for ?
You might want to look at BlueGriffon :
http://bluegriffon.org/pages/Download
Alex
Hi
Sorry! I though Bluefish WAS a wysiwyg editor 
I've just done a search
in my app-store/package-manager and found that tinymce claims to be a
wysiwyg editor.
I tend to use Joomla to directly edit my (well, my bosses) company's
website. That had a built-in wysiwyg editor (tinymce as it happens) but i
prefer to work on the html itself so i switched to a plain-text editor.
Drupal does something similar. Both are probably over-kill for what you
are looking for. They kinda replace Dreamweaver in many ways although
Dreamweaver can be plugged in as a front-end to make it easier to do some
things. Wordpress probably does the same thing but even though it's
supposedly much simpler it's still probably overkill.
What is the broader context for this? Do you have a web-facing website (ie
one that anyone can access over the internet) or an internal website that
can only be accessed over an internal LAN such as within a company? Is the
website hosted by a web-hosting company such as JustHosts or 1and1 or
someone? Most have a "1 click installer" for Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress
but it still takes quite a bit to figure out how to use such programs. If
the site is hosted on your own or your company servers then installing
Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress can be a bit tricky.
Regards from
Tom
iWeb - I don’t know if they’ve modified it. I had it on my older iMac, but it forced you to use templates - very simplistic. Great for many people, but not if you need to do much that’s out of their general plan.
I have looked at Blue Griffon. It seems to work with one form per page - and if it’s not one per page, it’s hard to access multiple forms. I like the feel of the program, but I also found basic issues. For instance, one of the first things I tried to do was join some cells in a table and that didn’t work at all. I also did some searching and found others had that problem with Blue Griffon a few years ago and it’s still not fixed. Not that it’s a critical bug, but it’s a notable one and it’s still outstanding - which does not look good.
From looking over what I could find, I think I read that Kompozer is an upgraded NVu and it looks like Blue Griffon is an upgraded Kompozer.
I found a few others of varying price ranges, but it’s amazing how many simply cannot import a normal HTML file.
Hal
BlueFish is a strange WYSIWYG editor. If I remember, you can edit HTML in one window or pane while watching the results in another, but I may misremember. I don’t know why they don’t just go all the way and allow straight WYSIWYG editing.
I’ll check on TinyMCE. I don’t think I had found that one.
I’ve considered Dreamweaver. If it weren’t monthly subscription based, I might spring for it once, but I’ve also tangled with fixing sites people have done in Dreamweaver and found just a huge mess of extra Javascript and HTML stuff that just wasn’t needed. I understand - it’s all done in templates and as interconnecting blocks and they have to make sure it all works together, but when you get to editing it directly, it’s no fun.
The broader context? My fiancée and I are looking for land to buy to build a house on. We want acreage and a place where it can be quiet and wooded. To make it short, we’ve looked at all properties for sale in the past year and a half, and now we’re searching for properties that are owned but don’t have anyone living on them. I’ve used GIS info and tax records. (I retired early from a business I ran based on data mining, so that was easy to sift through.) That leaves 1,200 sites that meet the numerical requirements, so I’m running a mini-website on my MacMini server that’ll let us see the Google Map images of the lots (with boundaries drawn over the maps) and let us page through them and reject a lot quickly. (As opposed to taking info and having to type it into Google Earth or Google Maps one at a time.)
I haven’t done HTML work in a few years, but it’s one of those things that comes up ever now and then.
The site is made up of 4 web pages with changing content and an approximately 1,000 line Python wsgi script.
Thanks for the other suggestions. I’ll definitely look into TinyMCE and see what that has.
Hal
Hi
Yeh, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress are almost definitely not what you are
looking for!
However i suspect that it might be easier and faster just to go with
Wordpress anyway but only if they give you a free hosting service
temporarily "just to see what Wordpress can do". Joomla offers such a
space but it's waaay to complicated to learn quickly and it's definitely
overkill for this - plus it uses the template structure you dislike!
Errr, given your skill-set it might be helpful to know (surprised if you
don't already though) that if you create a copy (ie back-up in case it goes
wrong!) of an Odt and change the file-ending from odt to zip. Then the zip
opens easily to show all kinds of interesting things inside the
container-format. The main bit is the
contents.xml
which you might be able to edit in a text-editor to do search/find-replace
to replace all the xml-coding with html-coding and then drag it and the
folders (such as the images folder) out of the zip file.
I'm not sure how efficient that approach is! For most of us it'd be a
complete nightmare but i've got a feeling you might find that the best
route for you!
Regards from
Tom
I actually worked with ODT files in that manner in my data mining business. It was easier, for many reasons, to generate output for clients with OOo (this was before LO) and much of what clients were doing was printing data out, so I had a program in Java (platform independent and Java interfaced with OOo well) that would use OOo for the final mail merge and printing. For reasons I won’t go into (and many of which I’ve probably forgotten years ago), it was easier to load the ODT files (wasn’t it something like sxw or something else back then?) in Java, unzip, edit the text in Java, then rezip and let OOo print it out.
Hal