Refer to my post on MultiDoc2HTMLv0.1 and I explained why I had to develop this software. The initial version that I started writing ran into some problems which I guess happened because of a corrupt installation of office on my PC or maybe the associated ActiveX libraries. Then I got an innovative mechanism running so the code worked fine. The only problem was that there were 2 executables reading and writing to an anonymous pipe and waiting on each other wasting (precious ;)) computing cycles. So I re-wrote this version in C# with .NET 3.5. This version is a single lean/mean executable of 15KB.

It is very easy to use, and free of some bugs (which I hope you already discovered) in v0.1. This software is an easy replacement to commercial tools which are generally e-book compilers. But who wants such a heavy package when all they need to do is combine multiple HTMLs into a single document. As I wrote in my previous post, MS Word has a function to insert HTML files into word. But it only works with around 25-30 HTML pages and after that without a warning the function gives up. Spooky as it sounds, I have experienced it on quite a few PCs now. Another interesting thing with MS Word is that it uses a lot of temporary files for recovery, etc. so generally automation fails because of this. I had to code a hack in this version to avoid that kind of a behavior. I generally close my Word automation server after every 25 inserts and re-open after that. Now the application is very scalable and can run multiple threads concurrently to have multiple documents generated and then merge all of them into one document. That maybe a task for the future version. Right now there is only a single worker thread.

I have tested the application with 1000 HTML files and it got a very nice word document out without any problems either with the automation server or sequencing. You can download the application by clicking here (Get MultiDoc2HTML v0.2). I have also posted the source code in my forum which can be found at: Forum Discussion: Multiple HTMLs into a Single Document – MultiDoc2HTML v0.2.

Ciao and have fun computing…