Handling a Word import with thousands of Undefined Styles?

[JKartheiser]

So, still somewhat of the "ultra-beginner" class, I'm currently working on a 500+ page Word import to Flare that has churned out just over 80,000 "undefined styles" in Analyzer. Naturally, I'm wondering if there's a way to map them all with a minimal amount of tears and heavy sighs.

Just looking around the text editor in the Flare htm documents, every single item seems to be some weird class/span class. And trying to edit in Analyzer seems to be a pretty slow process (and I'm not really sure how to map things in bulk to my own style sheet; I can rename them, but it doesn't seem to do anything?).

Is there a more efficient way of dealing with massive style adjustments, or is this likely going to be more of a page-by-page affair?

[dorcutt]

Hello,

The golden rule of word imports is to get the word document as clean as you possibly can before importing. This usually means:

• Making sure that all formatting is done through styles, not by local formatting (I suspect that your 80,000 styles are caused by Flare making a style for every arbitrary combination of local formatting)
• Stripping out all autonumbering added by multi-level lists and the like
• Removing manual page breaks/manual section breaks
• Removing headers/footers
• Only importing the actual content, not titles/tables of contents etc.

I'm not sure if it's too late for you at this stage, but going back, cleaning the Word document as best you can, and trying the import again would probably be your best bet. Alternately you could (also a pain), just flat out delete the CSS Stylesheet with the 80,000 styles and create a new one from scratch. This would be easier than trying to adapt that madness if you had to.

Good luck!

[emsachs]

If you are stuck doing this manually, you don't have to change every style in every topic by hand. If Analyzer says you have 59 instances of <p class="Elephant style="color:pink"> and you want to map this to <p class="PinkElephant">, you can use Find and Replace, click Find in source code, and replace all. That will clean up those 59 instances

Some caveats:

Do this on a COPY of your project!!
Try each change on a single file (that you know has pink elephants in it) first. Look at the topic in the XML editor after the changes.
Compile after each iteration to see if you got what you wanted. Make new backup copies frequently. (you may just have to copy the content folder)
This only works if you want to change the same paragraph type from one class to another. If you want to change from a <p> to an <h1>, for example, you have to work harder.