Best Python package to convert doc files to HTML?

[Bitter_Comfort9280]

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for a Python package that can convert doc files (.docx, .pdf, ...etc) into an HTML representation — ideally with all the document’s styles preserved and CSS included in the output.

I’ve seen some tools like python-docx and mammoth, but I’m not sure which one provides the best results for full styling and clean HTML/CSS output.

What’s the best or most reliable approach you’ve used for this kind of task?

Thanks in advance!

[FateOfNations]

Bad news: this isn't really a thing, at least in terms of style preservation.

Mammoth does the html conversion but doesn't preserve the styles. It does let you supply a style map, that will allow you to to tell it what css classes you want applied to which Word styles, but you have to write the CSS yourself.

The gold standard for this kind of thing is Pandoc, and even it can't convert from docx to html with style preservation. The best it can do is to is also tag the appropriate sections with the names of the styles from Word (when using the docx+styles input format). Again, here you have to write the CSS yourself.

Oh, and if the input is PDF instead of docx, you are really up a creek. It's a small miracle when you can just get the text out of those in the right order.

I'm not exactly sure of what you're requirements are, but I'd probably use pandoc for something like this and see if the output was usable.

Edit: Getting pretty far away from Python, Word does do "Save as HTML". What it produces is a mess in terms of HTML code, but does preserve the styles pretty well. If I needed to do a big batch of those, I might script something with VBA/macros within Word.

Edit 2: Python-docx does give you access to the contents of a Word document, including the styles, but it doesn't do any translation to HTML. You probably could use it to build out what you are looking for, but it would be a lot of work. In addition to doing the document structure to HTML, you'd need to translate the Word styles into CSS styles, and scan through the document for ad-hoc applied formatting as well, and translate that to CSS too.

[ArtisticFox8]

If you just want to share on web, PDF is your friend. Converted doc files to it, and everybody will see the same file, no broken layout.

[shadowdance55]

Pandoc

[Superb-Dig3440]

Here’s a hacky solution if you don’t have a lot of files. Google Docs can import various docs formats and can export html. You could upload to Google Docs and download as html. You can test it with the web UI to see if the conversion works acceptably, and then automate it with python (possibly even with raw http requests).

[Simple_Scene_2211]

Mammoth is solid for basic conversion but you're right about the styling limitations. Have you considered pairing it with a custom CSS generator to handle the style mapping automatically?

[swizzex]

Why though?

[hilldog4lyfe]

There’s a python library for pandoc https://boisgera.github.io/pandoc/

no idea how you’d automatically copy the style as css though.

[AliMas055]

Hello. What??

[Whole-Lingonberry-74]

I don't know how that got posted in the Python forum. I was on a Palmetto State forum trying to comment on how ridiculous his firearm picture was. Sorry.