Constant Contact to HTML conversion?

[Petmo]

I have a client that uses Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com) to write a monthly newsletter and send it to clients. I am her webmaster and she wants the newsletter posted on her site. At first it was easy to copy and past the content of the newsletter on a page (in and <iframe>) on her site, but it has become harder and harder to work with the format lately. I was wondering if anyone else has experience with this.
I first just copied and pasted it directly, then I converted it to .RTF and converted it to HTML, then I had to save it as .RTF, convert it to webarchive and then use a program to convert it to HTML. I then would tweak the CSS in the stylesheet to make it look like the original, now I am having to rewrite the page from scratch using <div>'s to replace the tables (which are off) and copying the fonts and colors in the stylesheet into the page. Very time consuming! Has anyone else found a converter or figured out a way to do this easily? Any help would be appreciated.

[Charles]

The printed page and the internet are two completely different media. What you are trying to do makes almost as much sense as trying to get the sheet music to sound the same as the recording.

An HTML document has to be marked up semantically and you can do that with OpenOffice using styles. You can do that with Word also but nobody does. And OpenOffice exports to PDF. You're client is going to want a PDF version so it always looks the same but you should also have a medium & platform independent HTML version to cover all the bases. Or if you want to chuck the HTML version just do the thing in Scribus.

[Petmo]

Maybe I did not explain this well enough. The newsletter is being edited and formatted with ConstantContact and sent as an HTML email. It looks like HTML but when you try to get at the code you can't. This is the client's page with the newsletter in it. http://www.lifestage.org/publications.html. I converted the February issue straight from the email, the March was not that easy but saving it as .RTF and using Preview (on a Mac) I was able to save it as a webarchive and then I used Webarchive Extractor to get it into HTML, but the current issue (May/June) was tougher as I described in the first message. I would gladly use a PDF format and just post that as a file on the website if I could get the email into that form. I am not trying to convert a written document to HTML just an email supposedly written with HTML to a webpage. It should be a snap but CC has done something to make that difficult.

[criterion9]

A quick view source showed me the location of the newsletter code: http://www.lifestage.org/newsletters/LiP0609/index5.html
Is there a "click here to view online" link from the newsletter. Another alternative is to receive the newsletter in a webmail system. Then you can just view source the page and extract the code you need. Additionally if the html code is already being constructed why don't you just view source in the editor? (I haven't seen an editor in years that didn't have a view source option).

[Petmo]

When I read your suggestion about Webmail I thought you had it, but I sent it to myself in Yahoo mail and when I viewed and copied the source I got the home Yahoo page not the newsletter. I even selected just the newsletter from the email but when I pasted it into an HTML page it was just text with no formatting. I got the userID and Password from my client and went to the ConstantContact site but they use a Wizard which is a form so you never see the actual code. The initial conversion of the page is here: http://www.lifestage.org/newsletters/LIP0609/index.html with the initial code the version 5 has the code all rewritten to affect such a small change.

[Petmo]

I found the answer! It is GoogleDocs. I just thought I would post this in case anyone else searches for a solution to this vexing problem (which I spent days trying to find the answer to). You just forward the message to docs.google.com and you can save it as a webpage and download it to your computer. This forum has helped me many times before so I wanted to give back when I can. Don't get me wrong about Constant Contact it is very good and easy for emailing a nice looking document. It just does not convert to a webpage easily, but that is not it's purpose.

[findashish]

Hi,
How can I forward the message to docs.google.com as the forward option is asking for the email.