MadCap Software Forums

When pasting text from Word into Flare, I can't seem to preserve para breaks. Any ideas anybody?

Cheers and thanks
MHP

No idea, but this was commented on many many many times and one can only hope that future versions of Flare will preserve paragraphs. The reason appears to be the attempt to strip all formatting, but I agree that ripping everything out makes the basic cut&paste to be unusable at times. If you have a lot of text to paste in you may want to see if you can import the document and then push the content around within Flare.
Put your word in here: http://madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

This is a known bug - the current workarounds are:

• Copy and paste anyway and fix the formatting in the Flare topic (for small amounts of text).
• Save the Word document as HTML and copy/paste the html code.
• Import the Word document - most styles can be made to get through the import process. You can copy from the imported topics, then discard them.

And of course, you can use the bug submission page (https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx) to add your name to the long list of people who have a problem with this.

wclass wrote:Save the Word document as HTML and copy/paste the html code.

I don't recommend that one, or if you have to, do it as a last resort -- Word's HTML output has a lot of garbage in it that you'd want to strip out.

wclass wrote:Copy and paste anyway and fix the formatting in the Flare topic (for small amounts of text).

I normally use this method - it allows me to apply the format I need as well as paragraph breaks, soft returns, lists, etc.

It's much the same as pasting in Word and using Paste Special -> Unformatted Text, except the paragraph breaks are skipped. And we all know the advantages of getting rid of SME's formatting....

If you check out the Beta for Blaze you will see how the copying from Word to Blaze has changed and will work better, Just a reminder most of the Features in Blaze will make it into Flare v4

What's the best and most useful way (the way that produces the best-looking result with the least busy-work) to get a table from Word 2003 into a Flare topic?

The one I'm interested in at the moment is 10x10, but I have some that are hundreds of rows long.

If I just paste it without formatting of any sort, it's a run-together blob/paragraph, as others have mentioned.
My brute-force method is to create the empty table then start selecting and dragging pieces of text from the blob until the blob is empty and each cell is populated... preferably with the correct content, but it's easy to miss when some cells are supposed to be empty, and some adjacent cells have identical content...

In FrameMaker, I just separated each cell's worth of text by a return or other delimiter, selected the whole thing and told Frame to turn it into a table X by Y. Frame did it.
If the table has an empty cell in the wrong place, or is missing an empty (or other placement problem), I undo the table creation, insert a return or delimiter (or other fix), re-select, and tell Frame to generate the table again. If it looks ok, I'm done.

I've looked through the Flare help and not seen how to delimit cell contents for importing/converting. In fact, there's nothing obvious about converting. I think even RoboHelp was more obvious about that. I know I'm just missing something straightforward or should have used search terms other than "import to table" or "create table" or "text to table" or....

Of course, all the comments in the previous posts apply, about Word's garbage-filled html.
How about importing into OpenOffice, and THEN into Flare? Import from OOo or just cut-and-paste? Export from OOo to some intermediate format?

Have you tried copying the table into a new Word doc and using Flare's Word import feature? That's be what I would try first.

The resulting imported table had cell-text overlapping cell boundaries, one row with fewer columns than all the other rows, etc. That might actually have been the way it was in Word, but it didn't appear that way.

It turned out to be easier/quicker/simpler to just create a blank Flare topic, create a blank table in the topic, and drag chunks of text into the cells and spot-format them. Tedious, but less tedious than trying to figure out the import mess.

Kevin

If possible, I try to avoid pasting in from MS Word into any application. Along with the text I want, Word brings in a lot of "stuff" that all too often creates havoc, and then needs to be fixed.

If you want to see an example, create a hyperlink in a blank Word document (http://www.a.com), save it as an HTML file, then open that in a browser and look at the source code. If you have not done this before, you might want to be sitting down when you view the code.

I've looked. It's ugly.

But if you are replying to the most recent post (mine) then this was an exercise to import from a Word source file (with a table) into Flare using the Flare menu functions that are supposed to do it cleanly. I wasn't impressed. But then I'm not all that good at debugging html stuff at the best of times, and this time was too inconvenient to be taken as a "learning experience". Brute-force recreation of the table was quicker than pasting-and-cleaning or importing-and-cleaning. YMMV


Kevin M