Importing Word Documents and Troubleshooting

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Comment

General appearance

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, make sure you have Keep Track of Formatting applied in Word. Also in the Style Pod tick Show Preview so that you can see where just the style has been applied and where it has been overridden.

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.

Tables

Tables should import cleanly using RoboHelp 6 or above. From RoboHelp 8 onwards you can map the Word table styles to RoboHelp table styles so that you have CSS driven tables.

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>

Check the body tag

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

<body lang=EN-US>

Check for unwanted code.

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>

Images may not show in Project Manager

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!