Importing Word Documents

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From a quick visual check in the WYSIWYG editor, your topics should look pretty much like they did in Word. If they don't and the styles seem to be messed up, look in Word for manual formatting that has been applied at paragraph level as opposed to character level.

Manual Formatting

What you should be aiming to have is a Word document that uses styles for each paragraph format that you want, rather than styles with variations being created manually. For example you should use Normal for most paragraphs and Normal Red for paragraphs that are to be formatted with red text, not selecting a paragraph and applying Red to the text. Unfortunately the latter is what most Word users will do but it is not the correct way.

Any manual formatting will convert to an inline style in your online help. You should be aiming to have it convert to an html class as that is controlled from your style sheet and makes mass changes much easier.

To find manually formatted paragraphs

In Word 2003 make sure you have this check box ticked in Tools | Options | Edit.

That's the one that gives you the much longer list of styles that you see in Word 2003. At other times you might want to clear that one! I place the cursor in each paragraph in turn and make sure the style does not have a + symbol after it. For example it shows as
 

rather than the style with a + symbol after it.

In Word 2007 / 2010 display the Style Pod > Click Options > Tick Font Formatting. Word will then show manual formatting in the pod.

The + sign indicates you have taken the style and modified it for that paragraph. "Normal Red" or "Heading 1 Red" would be OK as that indicates your document contains styles with that name. The + symbol is what you are looking for. You may find that you have to repeat the process several times over in the Word document as Word will ignore what we may regard as similar formatting because technically there is some difference.

The other way of doing this is to press Ctrl + A and then Ctrl + Spacebar as that removes all manual formatting. You then get the document back to the required appearance using styles rather than manual formatting. Be careful with that one though as it may make more changes than you really want. Check immediately and use the wonderful Undo feature if necessary.

It's OK to have individual words manually formatted as the import routine creates classes for those. That's useful as you can quickly change the class so that something bold in Word can be blue and bold in RoboHelp.

Headings

These should import with no unwanted changes to your HTML.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs should show in the style dropdown as either Normal or with a class that represents the style applied in Word.

You should find any paragraphs with the Normal style in Word come through as standard <p> tags in HTML. If you find instances of the <p> tag being written as
<p class=InLineNormal>
look to see if the document used Body Text rather than Normal. If it did, then use Word's Find and Replace to change the style to Normal. Also try clearing the "Auto-create styles from inline formatting" check box that you will see during the import process.

Other paragraphs will have a class applied and will look something like <p class=TheNameApplied> such as Indent, Bold, whatever name you used in Word for the style or changed it to during the import.That is correct.

Bullet Points and Numbered Lists

From RoboHelp 6 onwards, these should import correctly so that if you place the cursor at the end of a list and press Enter, you will get a properly bulleted or numbered item.

I did find the indentation was not right in one document but I think that was something unique to the document. If you have any similar problems, I would be interested to learn about them.

Click here if you are using RoboHelp X5

Custom Styles

During the import RoboHelp will create classes and include these in the HTML. For example you may have a style in Word called Indent. Normally this will end up in the HTML as <p class=Indent> and in the style sheet RoboHelp creates, it will define this style so that it has the same appearance as in Word.

It may be that after importing you are going to apply your own style sheet where the style is perhaps called Indented. Note that during the import RoboHelp tells you the style names it is going to apply and you can change them. In this case you would change it to Indented so that RoboHelp creates the HTML as <p class=Indented> and that will then work with your style sheet.

Tables

Tables should import cleanly using RoboHelp 6 or above.

If you are using X5 or earlier then as shown in Importing Using X5, tables look wrong in the WYSIWYG editor but they do display correctly in the output, at least they did in my tests. You can add rows and the result will be the same. Whether or not you can live with it is another matter.

If necessary roll up your sleeves and set about changing the borders. See Useful Tools if you have lots of tables to edit.

Images

Check for missing images. This can be caused by various things, check the following.

Word Settings - Rely on VML for displaying graphics in browsers

Over quite a long period there have been reports that when a Word document with images is imported, the images are missing in RoboHelp. The problem was that it was only an issue for some people. I got hold of a document where this happened every time for several users and sent it to Adobe.

They advised that MS Word has a document specific setting Rely on VML for displaying graphics in browsers which is un-selected by default but in the test document it was selected.

If you clear that option and save the document, the images will import.

You can find the Rely on VML for displaying graphics in browsers setting here:

Word 2007/2010
Office Button>Word Options->Advanced->Web Options…->Browsers->

Word 2003
Tools>Options>General Tab>Web Options

Word Settings - Allow PNG as a graphic format

There is also a setting Allow PNG as a graphic format. That option will prevent any PNGs in your Word document from being converted to JPGs and imported. The PNGs will show in Project Manager but will have a cross to indicate they are missing. RoboHelp will not import any PNGs in your Word document as PNGs.

Your options are to make sure this option is not ticked and allow RoboHelp to import the images as JPGs OR to force the PNGs to show as missing by selecting this option and then manually adding them in the correct folder in Windows Explorer. (You can extract the images from the Word document by saving it as a web page whereon Word will save all the images to a sub-folder.)

Steve Cohen found that by changing his Word documents as above, the import worked fine but then the images did not appear in WebHelp. The Word document had spaces in the filename and when he replaced those with underscores, all was well.

Linked images V Embedded images in Word

I know that if you link to a document rather than import, then if the document has linked images rather than embedded images, they will not be displayed in the RoboHelp output. I have yet to test if that is also a problem with imported documents.

Image alignment in Word

The following problem was reported on HATT.

"The issue is that when the Word document is imported, blank spaces are left for the images and they are not included. What is curious is that he used version 7.0 to do this previously - without incident.

Claudia responded "I recently ran into the problem importing Word 2003 docs into an earlier version of RoboHelp. What I found was that the pictures that disappeared were formatted differently than the ones that appeared. To see this formatting, open the Word doc, right-click the picture and select Format Picture. A tabbed property sheet appears. Click the Layout tab. If the picture is not set as Wrapping Style: In line with text, it will not be dealt with properly when imported into RoboHelp. My solution was to go through the Word docs I wanted to import and change each picture to In line with text."

I suspect the discrepancy between the question stating it did not occur in earlier versions and the response stating that it did, could be that the documents concerned had not been formatted in the way described.

DocX Format

Katie Hanson reported that one of her tech guys suggested saving the document in DOCX format and then her problems went away.

Bookmarks

If after the import you see text with a grey background, the problem is the way the bookmarks were defined in Word. Instead of placing the cursor in front of some text and creating the bookmark, this problem occurs where the text has been selected and then the bookmark has been created.

You will need to run the import again doing one of two things. Either clean up the bookmarks individually (try an interim import after you have changed some, just to make sure it is working) or you need to strip out the bookmarks and recreate them later.

My macros include one for this purpose but do run it on a copy of the document, not the original.

You can of course live with the grey background, it does no harm and simply means the topic does not look quite right in the RoboHelp editor.

Remove the meta tags that reference the source document.

RoboHelp adds these meta tags when importing a Word document. They can cause various problems, mostly but not exclusively when creating printed documentation.

<meta name=Originator content=ImportDoc>
<meta name=OriginalFile content=Working_Copy_2008_Procedures.doc>

These can cause problems when generating a printed output.

1] I was seeing tables with some borders twice the correct width and other borders correct. Removing them fixed that issue.

2] One poster found that the topic footers were appearing in his printed output. Many people would like to be able to do that but, ironically, this poster did not. Also the topic footers appeared at the bottom of the body of each page, not in the Word footer.

After import you apply a different CSS but your content does not display the styles correctly.

During the import and embedded style sheet may be created.

I have found this in topics created during import and of course it overrode what was in my stylesheet.

<style><!--

A:visited {
color: #800080;
}
A:link {
color: #0000ff;
}
-->
</style>

I found the language had been defined as below. I'm UK based so I removed the language reference.

<body lang=EN-US>

I found this at the end of my topics. To be honest, I don't know why it was there but my hunch is that one day I'll regret leaving it in and find it is the cause of some problem. If all else fails, try removing such code.

<implicit_p><b style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: 20.0pt; font-family: Verdana;"><br
style="clear: all;" clear=all>
</span></b>

Importing the images into a new project, I found they were in the topics but not shown in Project Manager. By looking with Windows Explorer, I found they were in a folder within the project. The folder had the name of the source document, Working_Copy_2008_Procedures, but that folder was not shown in Project Manager.

I added a new folder named Working_Copy_2008_Procedures and suddenly the images appeared!