experience importing large legacy Word documents?

[kristil]

I am seeking tips on converting and importing our legacy manuals into Flare projects. Our goal is to prepare the documents and the CSS so that we output hard copies from our Flare projects with a minimum amount of find-and-replace, removing, and/or reinserting.

We could use suggestions on the following:
1.Images - I have seen some posts about blurry images and resizing, and I have noticed some blurry images in my test imports. Our images are embedded and resized in our Word documents.
2. Cross-references - we use two types in Word, references to figure captions and references to page numbers. We'll want them to behave differently, but it looks like Flare is treating them the same and applying one xref style to them during import.

Any info you may have would be appreciated! Thanks.

[amberlink]

a few of my small icons are being resized, originally they are 12pixels x 12 pixels and being brought across as 500pixels x 700 pixels.

I solved this by creating a second style for icons and applying it in my converted topics.

[kristil]

Thanks, I'll pass that idea on to my team.

[amberlink]

well, I've also found another issue with this.

I have 2 graphic styles:

one for icons 20x20 pixels
one for images (which I'm finding one size does NOT fit all) 4x6 inches.

Which for the second, depending on the image, if anyone has any ideas I'd be appreciative. How do I get images to NOT be bound by the style? What I mean is, sometimes, images are different size specifically because the source image from Word was different sizes based on the capture. How do I translate that to Flare when I import? I don't want all my images to be the same size because not all of them render correctly at that size.

[KevinDAmery]

Just for grins, open one of the topics up in the internal text editor (or a text editor of your choice) and take a look at the img tags. It's possible there's some inline size code there. If there is, remove it and the size should go back to 1:1.

[amberlink]

Did just that (fuggedaboutit), no inline sizing.

[KevinDAmery]

Ok. When you resized the img class before, which method did you use? If you changed the height and width characteristics in the Box section of the stylesheet editor, what I would try is not setting any size at all. You can do that by clicking on the pulldown in the upper right and choosing (default). That *should* change the stylesheet to saying (not set) for width and height. (At least that's how mine works.)

[amberlink]

as you were typing, I was experimentin'

found the same solution.

[tomjohnson1492]

so what is the solution? i'm finding that my images are blurry, and I don't have any resizing settings in my img tag.

[kristil]

For me, what worked was resizing my images in Snagit. That gave me the least blurry images. Our team experimented with what pixel sizes fit in our margins in Word output. We came up with a max size plus a medium-sized image range and small image/icon range, and I went through my image folder and resized each image accordingly. Resizing in Snagit gave better results for the online images than resizing in Flare. Took me less than an hour for roughly 180 images.

We didn't set any sizes in our image styles, btw.

[ccardimon]

I am seeking tips on converting and importing our legacy manuals into Flare projects.

I realize this is an older thread, but I am running into this issue myself right now.

Much of the material I am importing and converting is in Word format.

Have we learned anything new?

[kristil]

Oh, yes. We presented to the local chapter of STC last week on our Flare implementation. I was planning a series of blog post based on the notes, and I was wondering where to start. The import of legacy Word docs would be starting pretty near the beginning, I suppose. I'll get to work on it tonight and post the main points as a reply here. Are you planning on producing Word docs from your Flare project once you have things imported?

[ccardimon]

Are you planning on producing Word docs from your Flare project once you have things imported?

In a word (pun intended), yes.

Word and PDF documents are the main deliverables here.

Online help is what I create afterwards.

[lacastle]

Here's another tip for importing Word docs with blurry images: import like you normally would, then convert (save as) your Word doc to .html format. You will get an html file (which you don't really need) and a folder (with the same name as your document) that contains the original image (not sized, .png) and the word image (resized, .jpg). just replace the images in Flare with the .png images from the folder! it's a little work if you have lots of images to replace (I had 450), but so much easier than retaking the screenshots.

[ccardimon]

I was planning a series of blog post based on the notes, and I was wondering where to start.

If you get the blog going, let me know where it is. I'd like to read it.

[ccardimon]

Here's another tip for importing Word docs with blurry images: import like you normally would, then convert (save as) your Word doc to .html format. You will get an html file (which you don't really need) and a folder (with the same name as your document) that contains the original image (not sized, .png) and the word image (resized, .jpg). just replace the images in Flare with the .png images from the folder! it's a little work if you have lots of images to replace (I had 450), but so much easier than retaking the screenshots.

Cool tip! Thanks.

[kristil]

I didn't post the blog yet (tonight ) but here are the main ideas. I'll add a link to my blog to my contact info. I've been meaning to do that.

Tips for importing laaaarge legacy Word docs:
1.Created the project. Added the files that are common to all of our team’s projects, kept in a master project. Example: the preface of the user manual.
2.Created the folders in the Content Explorer prior to imprort. These folders mirrored the structure/TOC of the legacy content.
3.Divided the legacy manual into separate Word documents. That way the topics created by each import could be easily sorted into the CE folders.
4.Prepare each document for import – you may want to remove cross-references, page breaks, section breaks, logo pages. You can test-import a document or two to see what doesn’t come over well.
5.Created a CSS with styles that corresponded to the styles in our Word template. Saved us from having to design a CSS from scratch. I hear you can do this by importing a document and create a CSS based on your Word styles. I don’t think this is what our CSS guy did, though.
6.Mapped to those styles during import.
7.Post import editing – imported lists all had to be combined, imported tables didn’t use table styles, many links and cross references were broken, many of our images were stripped out or placed in the wrong location.
8.Created TOCs that mirrored the structure of the imported content-quick turnaround for first iteration.
9.Formatted each style for online and print. (Arial vs. Times, indents, etc.)
10.Retained heading numbers – headings 1-5 formatted the same online, differently for print. Helped us to easily reassemble the manual.

[kristil]

Here's another tip for importing Word docs with blurry images: import like you normally would, then convert (save as) your Word doc to .html format. You will get an html file (which you don't really need) and a folder (with the same name as your document) that contains the original image (not sized, .png) and the word image (resized, .jpg). just replace the images in Flare with the .png images from the folder! it's a little work if you have lots of images to replace (I had 450), but so much easier than retaking the screenshots.

This is good trick. What about using the Word image from the folder? If it's not too blurry, then you would have the added benefit of knowing it's not too large for the margin, consistently sized, etc. for your Word target. Otherwise, wouldn't you still have to resize in an image editor so that the images aren't too large to viewed in the help without scrolling or too large for Word margins?

[lacastle]

If you just want to use the Word image from the folder (.jpg), you might as well just use the image that Flare makes in the import. I'm pretty sure they're the same thing.

My problem was that the Flare imported images were blurry from being manually resized in Word by the original author. I still used Photoshop to resize any large .png images down to 600px wide and 72dpi (the default for my help), but at least i knew they weren't going to be blurry. I think that tends to work fine in my Word ouput too.

[kristil]

I see. That makes sense. This may be an obvious thing, but I'm unclear: when you did it that way, did you have to reinsert the image?

Prior to Flare, we embedded our images in our Word docs, but also stored them in organized folders. When we imported, all of our images were renamed with numbers. Plus most of mine were either rearranged or stripped out of the resulting topics.So I had to reinsert them from the archive folders, at which point they were copied to the project with the names I had originally given them. After that, I went through and resized in Snagit.

I'm trying to picture whether your method would save us a step or two. Many of our documents have not yet been imported.

Thanks,
Kristi

[lacastle]

I think the only step I saved was not having to retake all of the screenshots just so I wouldn't get blurry images.

I still had to reinsert the images, but I don't like the very non-descript names that Flare gives imported images. At least with my way I can name then something descriptive and find them again. To reinsert, I right-clicked on an existing image in Flare and Edited the image to choose a new one.

This is all very repetitious, but that seems to be the definition of my job.

Something else:
If you embedded your images, this might not be as bad of a problem. My original Word docs had images just pasted into them (with Print Screen, etc.) so I didn't have any original files. If you have original .jpg's or .png's or whatever, you might be ok without creating the Word .html file (but still reinserting the images).

[kristil]

Ok. Thanks for talking that out with me. It's pretty likely that we have one or two docs to import for which we don't have access to many of the source images. So your tip will be very helpful for those.

Cheers!