Styles between Word and Flare (Flare 101)

[jessemds]

This is probably the most basic of questions, but after reading the help files and this forum for days, and losing sleep over my state of “overwhelmsion”, I have decided to post.

I have been forced to take the position of creating a user manual for the software that my company develops. Without knowing exactly what I was doing, I began this project about 6 months ago. I now have a bunch of Word files, some of which use styles, some use inline styling, and the ones that use styles seem to use different styles! It’s a mess. Obviously I will have to revisit all of my Word docs and apply styles to make everything consistent. Here are my questions…

1)- MS Word related, but how to I ensure that all of my Word files are using the same CSS?

2)-Is this a good approach: Use Word as my WYSIWYG and get my docs to look exactly how I want them to look in my Flare project, and then import the files and choose the option “Preserve MS Word Styles”?

Thanks
Jesse

[KevinDAmery]

I now have a bunch of Word files, some of which use styles, some use inline styling, and the ones that use styles seem to use different styles! It’s a mess. Obviously I will have to revisit all of my Word docs and apply styles to make everything consistent.

Well, that depends: do you need to maintain the content in Word, or can you migrate it to Flare and maintain it there? I prefer to maintain everything in Flare because I find it's easier to keep things under control.

1)- MS Word related, but how to I ensure that all of my Word files are using the same CSS?

Turn off the preserve Word formatting option--this will let you specify which css file to use when importing. But see below....

2)-Is this a good approach: Use Word as my WYSIWYG and get my docs to look exactly how I want them to look in my Flare project, and then import the files and choose the option “Preserve MS Word Styles”?

Again, it depends, how close are you to a "good" looking set of Word documents? If you have one or more that look the way you want them, then yes this would work, at least for the documents that have consistent use of styles. I would then import the "good" Word file with "preserve Word styles" on, allow it to create a CSS when you import, then for the rest of the files use a second import file with "preserve Word styles" off and specify the css that you just created.

If on the other hand you'd have to do a lot of work to get the Word files in good order, you may be better off to just strip out all of the style information (saving to a plain text file does an excellent job of this) then import the clean version into Flare and do all your design work there. As mentioned, Flare tends to be more consistent with styles, so as long as you don't need to maintain your content in Word I'd recommend using Flare as the source and apply your styles there.

[SteveS]

I've got to agree with Kevin.

It sounds as if your Word documents are inconsistant with style usage, so I'd drag everyhing into Flare without preserving or mapping styles. Cretae a Word document for each topic you need in Flare and do the import. Find a topic that will use each of your styles and create them using a style sheet. Then go through each topic applying your styles, creating extras as needed.

The throw away your Word files and maintain the project in Flare...

(And welcome to the forums )