Review: GoClick

Review by Gary Coyne

GoClick

Terry Morse Software

http://www.terrymorse.com/

Upgrades from Myrmidon: $49, New: $159

GoClick is advertised as a one-click approach to converting a document (any document) from any program into an HTML page. For the most part, that's kinda true, and for the most part it does a wonderful job.

But first, some background: Terry Morse, the creator of GoClick, has been a strong Mac programmer/presence for many years, and several years ago he developed Myrmidon: an HTML conversion program. All Myrmidon did was simply (I use these words with some trepidation here) convert a page from any program into a page of HTML that looked the same on the web as it did in the program that created it. Myrmidon, in effect, could be called "Adobe Acrobat" for the web.

Myrmidon had limitations, but Myrmidon worked, and worked well. However, you often had to prepare the document prior to conversion. That is, you had to be sure that any text was left, center, or right justified; you also had to be careful not to have any smart (curly) quotes. There were other pre-corrections recommended prior to conversion.

For those unfamiliar with web page creation, it seems like it should be fairly simple to convert a page of text into an HTML document. Unfortunately, if you simply copy text from a word processing document into an HTML document, all the formatting is lost. So, although one does not need to retype the document, one still has to reformat all the text to achieve the appearance. Then, there is the problem of creating the desired look and having it be uniform across other browsers and platforms.

One simple example for why one wants to convert text to HTML could be to show a business' profits and losses to their shareholders, via the web. Text such as this is often fairly complex with formatting that includes tables and charts. It addition, the original text often has varying font sizes and perhaps fonts of different colors. To try and recreate all that in HTML is often very hard and/or time consuming.

GoClick is the next step in the goal of document to web page conversion, and is a significant upgrade. Terry Morse considers GoClick a professional version of Myrmidon, and for those that do not feel like they wish to pay $159 for GoClick, one can still pay $99 for Myrmidon.

GoClick produces HTML v. 4 and can create CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). That means for example if there is text that overlaps a graphic, GoClick can utilize CSS to keep the text as text and the graphic as a separate entity. In HTML, a graphic with overlying text is converted into a single graphic object. The negative here is that any browser earlier than version 4 will not be able to properly present the material if it is made in CSS. Likewise, if the browser doesn't understand HTML v. 4, text characters such as curly quotes show up as a question mark ("?"). In addition to greater choices of how the document can be created, there also is a greater choice in how the document can be displayed. For example, with Myrmidon, if you had a 1 and 1/4 page document to convert, the final result would be two separate pages. With GoClick, one can choose the number of pages in multiple page blocks (i.e., blocks of 2 of the original text per web page).

To give GoClick a full test, I used three different challenges. A chemistry exam (in MS Word), a chemistry lecture (in MS PowerPoint), and text from a book I wrote several years ago (The Laboratory Companion--a gratuitous plug has now been made) (in FrameMaker). The thing that made these selections special is that the text is not straight across the page, and many special characters are used.

To produce a GoClick document, one selects GoClick in the Chooser, just as one would select a specific printer. If one had a fairly simple document, all that would have to be done at that point is to follow the products by-line and "create an HTML document with one click" by selecting Print from the File Menu, selecting a folder for the output, and clicking on "Publish." Otherwise, if there are any potential complexities in the document, one needs to go to Options in the Page Setup dialogue and "fine tune" GoClick to obtain the desired results.

In my experiments, test were observed on NN (3.0.1, 4.5, and 4.6), and IE (3.0.1, 4.0 and 4.5) all on a Mac.

Disappointingly, the CSS features are what seemed to fail the most. Using text from my book (in FrameMaker v. 5.5), one can see looking at the figure "CSS in IE," that displays a full set of the page-movement options that are created by GoClick. The "up" arrow can be used to let the browser go to a desired page, such as the home page (one of the minor failings of the program is that there is no easy way for the user to define a user selected graphic to go in this location). The left arrow pointing to a line brings the browser to the first page of the created web pages. The left arrow brings the user to the proceeding page. The numbers represent the individual pages so the browser can go to individual pages. Finally the right arrow brings the browser to the next page.

CSS in IE

The second row of "first page," "previous page," and "next page" should have been at the bottom of the page, not here. However, what was more surprising was how this page looked in Netscape (see "CSS in NN") where the top row was hidden behind the page, and the material that was supposed to be on the bottom of the page was once again below the (hidden) material.

CSS in NN

Despite the fact that IE was able to properly view the header of these pages, it severely jumbled the text on one page in particular as seen in "Jumbled text in IE" In NN, the page appeared much better, but still somewhat distorted. However, note that in NN "Jumbled text in NN" while the text is better, NN does not have full use of all HTML codes. Throughout all these tests, NN (v. 4.6) consistently had question marks for special characters. [This is a fault of NN, not of GoClick. However, to insure proper character representation across browsers, one should consider forcing such text into a graphic. Information on how to do this is offered by the GoClick instruction manual.]

Jumbled text in IE

Jumbled text in NN

If anyone suggests that one can easily convert an MS Word document into HTML simply using the "Save as HTMLÉ" option, reconsider. In the "GoClick Correct image below," one can see what GoClick created, which is reasonably accurate from the original text. However, in "GoClick incrrect image" one can see what MS Word did with this text. (It should be pointed out that the image shown is from Internet Explorer. The same exact same HTML pages shown in Netscape Navigator appeared quite different.

Curiously, Microsoft's PowerPoint's self-created HTML document does a splendid job of recreating a page, but it does it in the same manner that Adobe Acrobat creates pages. That is, it creates a full page image of the whole page. While this does create an accurate representation of the document, it does come at a cost. Size is one of those costs: the document I used to test in this write up was 336 k. Once converted by PowerPoint into an HTML document, it was 1.5 Mbts. The same document after GoClick treatment was 152 k. The second problem is if you want a web search engine to seek your pages and add them to a find list, it won't happen. Simply, a search engine cannot work with pictures--it must have text.

In short, GoClick does a wonderful job, but is no panacea. The more complex the original document and/or the more obscure some of the characters are, the more challenges there will be in converting the document into an HTML web page. While the program is not difficult to use, to use it well does require some experience and experimentation. Perhaps one limitation of GoClick is if an entire document is created with an error or an artistic fault, on a specific page deep within, it is almost easier to "reprint" the entire document rather than only the page in question. However, if you have a reasonably fast computer, this is not as horrendous as it sounds. A 20 page document is easily converted on a 266 MHtz G3 in less than 30 seconds.

Perhaps one of the bigger limitations is that all graphics within a given document can be either GIF or JPEG, not both. (GIF is the preferred graphic format for simple images, like buttons, while JPEG is the preferred graphic format for complex images like photographs). Thus, if you have a document with both simple and photographic images, and want both combined, you will have to do some post-conversion operations. My last "annoyance" complaint is one that still remains from Myrmidon: you must be careful to create a folder for your web pages to be published within because neither Myrmidon nor GoClick will. A folder for a 20 page will contain 20 web pages plus an image folder. If you tend to have randomly distributed icons in your folders like I do, it's not a pretty sight.

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October 16, 2008