(Whenever speaking of rtftohtml in the following I mean rtftohtml extended by rtftoweb.)
To convert a document from RTF (Rich Text Format) to HTML, rtftohtml requires the contents of the RTF-file to be formatted with a certain set of paragraph styles. For example, headings at level 1 must be formatted with the paragraph style "heading 1" (which is the built-in default for headings anyway; german heading styles may be called "Überschrift xy", but they appear in the RTF file as "heading xy", too), lists must be formatted with a paragraph style such as "numered list" etc. The reason for this is that rtftohtml needs to know which paragraph styles it should map to which HTML tags. This mapping between styles and tags can be customized be editing the file html-trans in rtftohtml's library directory (see section html-trans for more), to create a mapping from your own individual paragraph styles to HTML-tags. Although this is not as complicated as it might seem, I personally prefer to adjust my Word-documents to use only (or at least mostly) the paragraph styles recognized by rtftohtml by default. In this chapter I will stick to this strategy. See section "Adding paragraph styles" for a few words on how to customize rtftohtml to correctly interpret your own paragraph style.
To make the creation and preparation of Word documents that are to be converted to HTML as easy as possible, I have included a style file for Microsoft Word 6.0, called rtftoweb.dot into the rtftoweb-tar-file. Section "A .dot file for WinWord" describes the usage of this file in more detail.