Using the Author-IT Converter

[katireen]

We are testing out the Author-IT converter.

The good news is it is fast and it does import all of the text and the list styles that were defined in author-it.

The bad news is we initially ran into three issues.

1. We noticed that we were unable to edit styles until we went into the text editor and removed a / from a line. Diagnosed by the awesome madcap support folks. Shout out to their support folks!

2. The other issue is all the styles end up in the general css list and there is no way to map the styles again the support folks helped with this and put in a feature request for this, but as of now there is no automated/mapping solution.

3. Third issue, all the font came in differently for the p tagged content.

Happy to see all the content come in, but anyone run into any other bugs. Just trying to plan out a migration timeline and I just want to get a heads up on any other issues others have run into with the converter. Looking for anyone else's issues on importing content from Author-IT to get ahead of some of those issues during migration.

Thanks!

[flequus]

I know it has been a while since you posted, but I was wondering how you were able to get the list styles to come over from AIT correctly.

Our experience is that when you publish to XML, AIT publishes OL and UL as paragraph tags (<p class = bullets>, for example). It is not the fault of the converter tool that we are getting trash out of our AIT projects, but it is a major migration stumbling block for us to have to manually turn all of the lists back into lists.

I also feel that there should be a style mapping step in the converter tool. In the interim, we are using the Kaizen plugin to swap out the styles.

[doloremipsum]

@katireen That is interesting, because it isn't my experience at all. I'm converting a large (inherited) AuthorIt library. For me the lists generally come in alright, with one exception: any change in the li style is included as an entirely separate ul/ol element. So whenever the li class changes (e.g. li.bullets -> li.nobullets) we get a separate list; and whenever there are nested list the structure is flattened out into separate lists. Annoying because you have to go through and combine the lists again, but not too much of an issue.
(The MS Word import is much worse for lists in my experience!)

My solution to style mapping was just to give everything in Flare the same style names as it had in Author It. It would actually be nice to change the names of some of these styles, but maybe that is a job for Kaizen later on. (She said as if she would ever have time to do that.)