Importing Word documents to RoboHelp

[The_Alpha_School_System]

confused;
Has anyone else experienced importing Word 2003 documents into RoboHelp and found large bright green or yellow lines appear randomly throughout the documents. These then transfer into FlashHelp. I can edit them out manually but if ever I have to reimport the document, all that manual editing has to be done. Any suggestions on how to avoid this would be most appreciated. I can't find any consistent anomalies in the Word document to be causing this.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Alpha School System and welcome to our community

I think if it were me, I'd see if there was a discernable pattern at play. Hopefully there will be. Look at the topic(s) with the odd coloring and shading. Examine them to see what RoboHelp HTML is adding that gives that effect. Now look at the Word Document in the same place where the text occurs. My guess is that you will find some weird character or style that is present in Word that isn't being properly translated into RoboHelp HTML.

Just what I would do though... Rick

[The_Alpha_School_System]

Thanks Rick. I had already looked for this. I've kept my styles pretty simple and can find no consistent reason for this weird phenomenon. The styles where it occurs are just plain old Normal, Arial, size 10. However, when it does transfer across, the style is renamed to Inline Normal6 e.g. Other text above it either stays as Normal or Inline Normal. It really is quite bizarre and very colourful!

[MergeThis]

It appears that your Word files are badly corrupted.

I would look to finalizing the Track Changes function within Word, where I would ensure that all changes have been accepted or rejected. That may or may not help.

I would also question that "Inline" style issue, where I believe RH is seeing years' worth of manual, inline formatting that was done in Word in addition to the style selection, and attempting to deal with it.

To experiment, I would Select All, Copy the entire content in one of these Word files, then Paste it into Notepad. Then remove any extraneous line breaks until the paragraph formatting looks right, and Select All, Copy again. Then in RH, create a new topic, paste the Notepad-copied content, and assign the proper styles. I suspect that you'll be pleased with the result.


Good luck,
Leon

[The_Alpha_School_System]

Thanks for that. Although I tried to keep the document clean and fresh, I suspect you're right with the old formatting because several users were copying and pasting into the documents and were using old stuff or formatting on the go. I'll give your suggestions a try.