Import word doc with wmf illustrations

[Muttley]

As a complete newbie to Flare I'm at a loss. I'm trying to import a word document that has a lot of wmf illustrations. The few png illustrations import without issues but not a single wmf comes along for the ride. I have checked that they are actually in the word document as pictures. I have Word 2007 installed and the file has a docx extension. I did try converting the file to an html to identify the pictures but this created wmz files for the illustrations. Any ideas?

[SteveS]

Hi, and welcome to the forums.

I just tried a docx with wmf image import using Flare IV and it worked flawlessly except the image was converted to .png, which shouldn't pose a problem If anything I would class that as desirable).

I'm not sure why your import hasn't worked, but some tips to help importing from Word are make the Word document as clean as possible before importing, map the Word styles to Flare and don't preserve MSWord styles.

What version of Flare are you using and are you importing into an existing project or creating the project from your Word document?

[Muttley]

Hi Steve
Thanks for your reply. I'm using Flare V4. I have tried both creating a project from scratch and importing into a topic with the same results. Keep getting a "Parameter is not valid" message in the import progress window every time Flare detects an illustration. Have tried all combination's of mapping and still get same results. Can copy paste images within Word but Flare won't let me paste from the clipboard. I know the Word file is quite a few years old and certainly wasn't created in Word 2007. I sure the owner has converted to the docx format from the old file, I don't know if that could have something to do with the problem.

[SteveS]

Hmm.

Sounds a bit suss.

Are the images linked to the Word file or have they been embedded?

[Muttley]

Got he following reply from Madcap support.

"Thank you for contacting MadCap Technical Support. The WMF image is not a websafe image and will not be displayed in the XML editor, you will need to convert these images to a websafe image such as JPG, BMP, GIF Once these images are converted they should appear in your XML editor in Flare."

As the document is illustration rich I have only had time just to try a couple of images. They still won't import to the xml editor but at least I'm able to insert as a picture now. Seems strange Madcap claim the program can handle the wmf format, when their support response seems say the opposite. Also strange that you were able to import without issues.

As I don't have access to the original illustration files it looks like this document is going to be a long haul to get into Flare.

[KevinDAmery]

I'm not sure about the steps because it's been a while, but I think it's possible to export all of the images in a document out of Word. If you can do that, there are also some relatively inexpensive image converter applications out there that can batch convert from one format to another. So that would take care of going from wmf to png.

Inserting all of the images again will be time consuming, but hopefully the other two steps in the process can be sped up.

[LTinker68]

Seems strange Madcap claim the program can handle the wmf format, when their support response seems say the opposite.

Do you have the XML Editor set to display in the web layout or in print layout? Since it's not a web-safe image, it wouldn't/shouldn't show in the web layout, but it might show up in the print layout view. I don't use that graphic format, so I haven't tried it. But if you're using the same project to output both web and print, then you should switch to a format that works in both. If you're just outputting to print then the WMF format might be fine; just switch the XML Editor to print layout view.