Mapping list styles for imported Word content

[Cam]

I am importing content from Word. I want to preserve the numbered and bulleted lists in my document. However when I get map paragraph styles in import wizard, the list styles in my stylesheet are not available.

How/Where do I map numbered and bulleted lists so that they are preserved in my imported Word content?

[mikejp]

This is an issue I hit today as well, with Flare 3.0.3 & Word 2003. Do you happen to know if Word 2007 helps?

[KevinDAmery]

If you import the files, do the lists disappear? If so, I'd call that a bug....

[mikejp]

Not quite. li. styles are not available in the import mapping dialog, only a p. style of the same name.

So, one can choose to import such that all li. elments need reformatting (first case), or lose list enumeration (the second, even less useful, case).

This dim-wittedness for Word imports seems the polar opposite of the RH imports I played with some time back. Imports from Word seem to create an over-simplistic markup, from RH a markup that made perfect sense but left print from html help, and a Word 2003 target, for dead.

Minimum I'd hope for is to be able to map a Word style to li.something and have that recognised as an ol or ul. I've haven't tried yet, but can one search for and replace every occurence of a style (sigh)?

A second irritation is that the elements in a list aren't contained in the same ol, or ul, when the li elements are separated by, in my case, an indented para. I guess sequential numbering isn't enough for Word to tell Flare that this should be a continuous list? Once again, I haven't tried too hard yet, but can one paste more than one element into an ol or ul at a time (second sigh)?

I'm sure this stuff ought to be far easier that it appears to be.... or did you spot the bug?

[KevinDAmery]

Darn. I guess it could be related to the fact that Word isn't a structured format the way HTML or XML are. For example, the only thing that really connects the elements of a list together are the visual cues of indentation and numbers / bullets. There's nothing like an OL tag wrapping everything inside the Word doc.

Sounds like a feature request to me.

[mikejp]

Which is why I asked about Word 2007. Didn't MS hide some XML in there somewhere? Or is it, in practice, just a ribbon on the same old, same old?

Seriously - Good idea. Surprized no-one's asked already. This 'feature' is just a huge waste of time, especially as Flare's interface doesn't seem to want to help fix it.

[KevinDAmery]

It is a little surprising. In my case the Word imports I did were of draft TOC documents, so for the most part I was just dealing with headings and preliminary body text, with the intent of doing the main authoring in Flare. If you have more robust Word documentation your needs will be more elaborate than mine were.

[LTinker68]

I've haven't tried yet, but can one search for and replace every occurence of a style (sigh)?

There are some who've had luck with this in some cases, but I don't think it'll work that easily in your situation. If your list came over as p.list, for example, then you could do a global find-and-replace to change <p class="list"> to <ol>, but you'd still have to go in and add <li> tags to each list item. At the very least, you can do a find to find all occurrences of that class, but you'd have to fix the lists yourself.

[KevinDAmery]

Which is why I asked about Word 2007. Didn't MS hide some XML in there somewhere? Or is it, in practice, just a ribbon on the same old, same old?

Couldn't tell ya, as I haven't got Word 2007 to work with yet. I know MS talked about it being XML based, but as far as how they implemented it....

EDIT: Here's a thought, though. What happens if you export an HTML or XML file from Word, then copy those into the Flare content folders and open them?

[Cam]

The only way around it that I have found is to select \"Preserve Word Formatting\" on import. If I do that, the numbering is preserved, along with all of my Word text formatting which I do not want. After import, I go in and modify the generated Flare styles to achieve the desired look.

What I am wondering though is what happens when I update the Word content and reimport. I am afraid the answer may be that the style changes I made are overwritten by the Word formatting and I'm back to where I started.

[SteveS]

I just created a simple Word document with a numbered list and saved it as a .docx, the new native format for Word.

I then changed the file extension from .docx to .zip in Explorer, unzipped the file and opened the document.xml file in Notepad++. As an aside, all the Office 07 native file formats end in x; docx, xlsx, etc. If you change the extension to .zip you can see all the xml files Office uses for the saved document.

The bad news - the Word XML does not correspond with HTML so there is still no universal translator for Office documents. Damn.

[KevinDAmery]

Steve, does it look like there's anything in there you could do a find / replace or some sort of XSLT on to get standard formatting?

[SteveS]

Code: Select all

<w:p w:rsidR=\"003E21B8\" w:rsidRDefault=\"003E21B8\" w:rsidP=\"003E21B8\">
- <w:pPr>
  <w:pStyle w:val=\"ListParagraph\" /> 
- <w:numPr>
  <w:ilvl w:val=\"0\" /> 
  <w:numId w:val=\"7\" /> 
  </w:numPr>
- <w:rPr>
  <w:lang w:val=\"en-AU\" /> 
  </w:rPr>
  </w:pPr>
- <w:r>
- <w:rPr>
  <w:lang w:val=\"en-AU\" /> 
  </w:rPr>
  <w:t>Item 3</w:t> 
  </w:r>
  </w:p>

Guess not - this is a list item.

[KevinDAmery]

I'm beginning to see why they declined to accept Word's XML as a standard

[mikejp]

and

'they'? Try 'we'.

[Ken Billing]

Anybody discover any tricks for this in the last 6 months? I'm curious as to how Cam was able to preserve Word styles and get numbering. I tried this but didn't get any numbering. I think this is one of the last issues I need to resolve before I have a working stylesheet and Word template for round tripping Word documents. Any wisdom would be greatly appreciated.

[mikejp]

I invested some effort into round-tripping Word and hit the self-same buffers. Another killer is the way our localization works, which requires the preservation of htm filenames and links in en-US, which a direct import of a translated .doc can't do.

Re-naming the files in, and re-linking, a small help system (say 20 topics) is easy but too time consuming and tiresome for a real, heavily x-linked olh x10 that size. Now that localization vendors have Lingo (Can anyone recommend a vendor who's gotten past a pilot project?) my problem shifts to completing the development of a nicer-looking print target for the localized projects. I guess what I'm suggesting is that round-tripping Word sounds great but, assuming a streak of evil in your own personality, it's the kind of task you give to your worst enemy. It's not that it can't be done; it just doesn't seem to be scaleable in any meaningful sense.

Word imports are necessary, as is the oh-so-frail .doc target. You might like to think about review via .pdf annotation or, down the line, X-Edit.

Here's where I'm hoping all those clever folk out there who've cracked round-tripping Word tell us that it's actually very, very easy. I could really do with that same wisdom right now as well.

[Ken Billing]

Thanks for sharing your experience, Mike. Mine are, indeed, large documents with many topics. When you suggest markup via PDF instead, how would you generate PDF output without Word, via the PDF output feature of Word 2007? Wouldn't it suffer from the same Word output weaknesses?

[mikejp]

In general, I find Word input more time consuming to sort out than Word output, and the .pdf (from Word/Flare) is one of our deliverables anyway. Enabling that for review in Reader, and then consolodating the comments for a last polish of both the help and .pdf is just another non-ideal task.

I'd like to try out Flare's feedback server for the review cycle, and even beta testing, but it probably won't happen. It's not a $ issue so much as a people/time vs project deliverables thing. But X-Edit Express will, apparently, be free , and simple.

[LTinker68]

But X-Edit Express will, apparently, be ... simple.

From your fingertips to the programmers' ears.

[Ken Billing]

My fingers must be speaking the wrong language, then.

[wclass]

Anybody discover any tricks for this in the last 6 months?

I think there are still a few problems. You need to invest some time in understanding styles, especially the print and screen medium.

Word import puts all topics in the one folder, and generates file names, which means than any round trip has to start with the Word file. I think this is unmanageable for large projects. I put in a feature request to be able to create sub-folders. For example, I’d like to create a folder for, say, each section or level 1 heading and then split topics on level 2 or more.

Running headers/footers don’t import but you can work around this (create master page separately).
Lists within lists don’t import properly – can fake this with styles that have a wider left margin to make the lists look indented.
I’ve had simple tables survive a round trip.

For numbered paragraphs there is a sort of work-around – involves pre/post processing. In Word my heading levels 1-4 are usually numbered. Before import I turn these off. I use the style names of H1 – H6. After I create output, I then attach my existing Word template that has the proper styles with numbering, and the numbers magically turn back on. I think you could set the Hn styles in Flare to have numbering for the print medium and you wouldn’t have to change templates (I already had a macro to attach a template). I think you are better off clearing numbers before an import though.

As for the print medium, we have gone a step further and created an “msword” medium so that our printing to Word does not clash with people who print what they are viewing in a webhelp file.

[Craig.Prichard]

I have been losing hair over the myriad challenges associated with getting MS Word content into Flare without massive tweaking on both sides. After spending some time researching and experimenting I think I might have a way to streamline the process. The solution would involve:

• Word templates - user definable
• Controlling but not completely constraining how the user creates the content in Word - the component the user cannot override
• CSS file(s) that map to the Word templates - user definable

Before I go to any additional great lengths to implement my idea, I want to poll the forum for feedback on the usefulness of such a solution. If most people are content to simplify their Word work and save the more interesting stuff for Flare, then I cannot justify the expense of crafting this solution. But if many people regularly need to move massive, complex content from Word and Flare (and possibly do this process iteratively) then I will consider pressing on. My challenge was a one-of scenario so I cannot justify the development. If the community would benefit sufficiently then I will consider pressing on.

Not so much an issue of Styles but interesting nonetheless, I have also figured out a way to do simple conditional content in MS Word which could be mapped to Conditional Tags in Flare upon import. I developed the solution when I needed to maintain both V1 and V2 content within the same master DOC but create separate V1 and V2 DOCs as deliverables. Let me know if there is any interest in this.

Your thoughts?

[Ken Billing]

I'm definitely interested, Craig. I've spent the better part of the past two weeks following various techniques for all the Word features we use (most) through the Word/Flare round trip process; enough that I'm tempted to write an e-book or web article on it. The explanations of why things work or don't work are rather lengthy. I suspect that those of us who've had some success with it use similar techniques for some things. But I have found a couple unorthodox ways of accomplishing things that weren't intuitive on the surface as well. It's a huge time waster that I'm sure affects a lot of Flare users. I can only justify it by the hope that once I nail the process and prerequisites down, I won't have to do it again for a long time and it will pay off in rapid document publishing.

[mikejp]

That e-Book you mentioned. I'd spend my money on it, never mind the company's.