Problems with documents imported from Word

[Linda Furlet]

Hi! I've never posted before, but here is finally a topic where I have
something to contribute!

I just converted three novels from Word, each about 200,000 words. My
experience actually wasn't too bad -- I created a Frame 12 template,
created a book, and then started importing the Word docs using the Word
filter, chapter by chapter. Then I developed a set of styles and went
through each chapter and applied the relevant style to each paragraph. I
actually had some fairly complex formatting in Word that I was able to
recreate in Frame with little trouble. I did not attempt to match style
names but instead developed new styles for Frame and applied those.

Even going through and applying a style to each paragraph, it took only a
few hours to reformat almost 600 pages in the first book.

Perhaps my experience was different because I wrote the novels in Word,
with each chapter as a separate file, so each file import was smaller. In
my experience, Frame chokes on massive Word files.

I finished the first book and sent it to the printer, and everything went
off without a hitch. The e-book has been more of a problem because of
hyphenation; I finally decided to turn the hyphenation off for e-book
because hyphenated words appeared to have weird spaces in them when I
viewed the mobi file on my various Kindles. I don't like Word at all, but
it certainly does a better job of hyphenation than Frame does (IMO).

Sincerely,

Linda Furlet


On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 10:37 AM, Keith Soltys <keith.soltys at tmx.com> wrote:

> I would not import Word into FrameMaker using the Word import filter.
> Given that you are working with novels, which have a fairly simple format,
> I would save the Word files as raw text, bring them into FrameMaker as
> text, and completely reformat from scratch.
>
> I am not sure why the export from PDF to text would cause you problems
> unless the export isn't pure text.
>
> Regards
> Keith
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:
> framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Theresa de Valence
> Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 11:16 AM
> To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
> Subject: Problems with documents imported from Word
>
> Hi Framers,
>
> What do I do to clean up files which originate in Word or PDF. I'm turning
> crime fiction novels into ebooks and have run into a few problems.
>
> Case 1:
> I import simple Word files into Frame then publish as epub or mobi. In the
> finished version there are strange display behaviours in the middle of the
> book (font size and weight and italic drastically change, then return to
> normal).
>
> Is there a way I can "clean" files before I begin preparing them for
> publishing?
>
>
> Case 2:
> You may suggest that I ask this question on a Word forum, but everyone
> here knows everything, so here goes:
>
> Client has no "original" document so I've taken his PDF and used Adobe
> Acrobat to convert to text, massaged it in Frame to fix various things,
> then copied and pasted in Word. Going through the editing process, I
> cannot join two paragraphs together (by deleting the carriage return)
> and the Track Changes feature shows all kinds of formatting changes,
> which are totally unnecessary. In this case, I also want to strip the
> document of any formatting.
>
>
> I never work in Word to do any work, except when I am copyediting a
> nearly complete document (using Track Changes).
>
> Advice please?
>
> Thanks,
> Theresa
>
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