I've been searching for a while now and have found no simple solution for this issue. I'm working to set up a CMS (Drupal in this case) and want to find a way to enable the writers - using Word 2004 - to upload their own content, properly styled in clean XHTML.

I want to avoid any extra steps as more steps leads to more chances for errors to creep in. The only formatting needed is semantic content; just HTML body content without extraneous Word Roundtrip information or formatting at all as all design should be defined by using CSS stylesheets.

I just want the basic stuff i.e. h1-h6 headings (defined at the authoring stage, using Word's standard styles), bold, italics and quality typography (all accents, "curly" quotes and em-dashes) properly encoded into human readable XHTML entities (ie & becomes <tt>&amp;</tt>).

I'm worried that I'm going to have to compromise on quality or make, what to my mind should be basic functionality, a laborious and error-prone process...

Does anybody have a solution? Is this doable by hacking/editing the "Word Conversion Options" or "com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist" files?

[The basic structure (headings) can be handled by the CMS's interface thanks to TinyMCE and its Paste From Word function - but this cannot handle bold, italics, accents or typographic features all of which are stripped out.]