Word styles not appearing in Print Document Appearance dialog

[Guest]

My custom list styles in Style Mapping.dot are not appearing in the Print Document Appearance dialog when I try to map CSS styles to Word styles.

The styles do appear in the template when I open it in Word. They appear in the styles task pane whether I select "In current document" or "In use" in the Style Pane Options dialog in Word. The styles have the same name (such as "Bullet" or "Number") in Word as the CSS styles in RoboHelp.

I tried saving Style Mapping.dot as .dotx, thinking that RoboHelp 8 might work better with the current template type, but no help. I tried adding the template to the same folder as the Normal.dotm template is in and opening it there. No improvement.

Oddly, the built-in Word styles List, List 2, & etc and List Continue and its series appear in the Robo dialog, but the styles List Bullet and others in that series do not appear.

I suppose I could modify the list styles that do appear in Robo and map them to my CSS list styles, but that feels a bit like a desperate kluge.

Does anyone know what might be wrong, either with my Word template or with Robo, that might be causing what seem to be perfectly good Word styles to not present themselves for mapping?

Thanks again,

John

[Peter Grainge]

I'm glad you included the style names as that explains the problems. Mapping single level lists is not possible, in theory. In practice it can be done. See the Lists pages on my site and look at Printed Documentation at the end of Single Level lists.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Peter,

I think your discussion of this problem could explain the situation and propose a workaround more simply than it does.

Based on your article, I assumed that Robo displays only the built in Word list styles such as List and List Continue (since those were the only styles showing up in the style mapping dialog and since your example shows matching a Robo style named List Mapping to a Word built in style named List). I assumed I would have to match my Bullet style to a style named List in Word, and match the indented bullet style to List 2, and so on. The actual situation is that Robo, for some godforsaken reason that only idiots would understand, will not show a Word style if any numbering (bullets or numbers) is applied to it. That is, one does not have to avoid a class of styles called “List styles”, one only has to avoid applying numbering to the styles until later.

Thus the workaround is to create the word styles (with names that match the Robo styles!) that contain every attribute you need EXCEPT the numbering. That is, I can link Bullet to Bullet and Number to Number and Indented Number to Indented Number, and so on and on, as long as I have all the Word styles in the template with their numbering set to None.

Then after I generate the document, I can modify the styles to add the appropriate numbering, and voila!

Currently scrolling the doc & modifying styles. Might be a glimpse of daylight.

John

From: Peter Grainge

Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 8:47 AM

To: John Dawson

Subject: Word styles not appearing in Print Document Appearance dialog

Re: Word styles not appearing in Print Document Appearance dialog

created by Peter Grainge<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Peter+Grainge> in RoboHelp - View the full discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/3969382#3969382

[Peter Grainge]

No my method is not about mapping to Word styles that do not contain numbering and then adding the numbering to the style.

In RoboHelp the list part (bullets and numbers) comes from the list style applied for the OLH. It is the paragraph style that is also applied to the contents of the list the comes into play for the mapping.

(RoboHelp list styles do not appear on the left, you can create paragraph styles that do have list attributes in them in older versions of RoboHelp but it was a bad practice that causes problems upgrading to RoboHelp 8 or 9.)

So when you map, you are linking RoboHelp's paragraph style that is sort of superimposed on the list to Word's master list style, if I can describe it that way. When you open the document all the lists are true lists rather than something that looks like a list but isn't if you press Enter at the end of a list item. No need to do anything in many situations.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Yes, I understand that it is actually paragraph styles and not list styles that appear in the list in RoboHelp. I just spent 3 days going back and manually adding all the paragraph styles back in to Robo. Frankly, I consider this structure just another step in RoboHelp’s downward spiral. Now I have to apply two things, a list style and a paragraph style, to every list type paragraph.

But that is somewhat beside the point. I also realize that you did not describe a workaround to map robo styles to custom word styles and then add the list attribtes to the Word styles. What I am saying is that you should have described that process because it is much easier, simpler, and easier to understand (because both the robo style and the Word style have the same name, so I don’t have to keep track of what List and List Continue etc etc are really mapped to), easier than the process you actually described on your site. As I said in my previous, after reading your page, I mapped my styles to List & etc but then found out the hard way that they didn’t appear in Robo because I had formatted them with numbers, another big waste of time. It would have been more straightforward to simply create the needed styles in Word without the numbering attributes and then add the numbering after the doc was generated.

john

From: Peter Grainge

Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 12:28 PM

To: John Dawson

Subject: Word styles not appearing in Print Document Appearance dialog

Re: Word styles not appearing in Print Document Appearance dialog

created by Peter Grainge<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Peter+Grainge> in RoboHelp - View the full discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/3971826#3971826

[Peter Grainge]

Strictly speaking in HTML it should all be in the list style and you can do that in RoboHelp if you wish. Yes it is a change that was implemented in RoboHelp 8 to make the HTML more standard. You can use a mix in both Dreamweaver and RoboHelp and that is what I do, quite apart from reasons connected with this method.

Back to this thread...

What you are doing may be simpler but as you are saying, it requires post document generation work every time. What I have described avoids that for many users and will give them a ready to go document.

You say both the RoboHelp style and the Word style have the same name. Where? In RoboHelp I have created the list style PG List and the paragraph style List Mapping. Unless you go into the section on Images I haven't touched the Word template and those names don't appear in any supplied template. The styles you amend in Word do not have those names so I am not seeing what caused that confusion.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge