The new Word Import feature provides greater control over manuals by allowing for the configuration of various settings during the pre-import stage. This feature offers two selections: Advanced Import for documents requiring more configuration, and Quick Import for those that do not.
Creating a Web Document using content from Word
To create a Web Document, select Documents → Add document → Import from Word, which will trigger the "Word Import: File Upload" dialog box
When a Word document is selected, you can choose between Advanced Import, which provides detailed Word Import settings, and Quick Import, which imports with a set of predefined settings.
Pressing the Advanced Import button opens the Word Import: Configure headings and styles dialog.
Configure Headings
Configure headings and styles window allows for mapping of headings from a Word document to Web Manuals, and also allows for the placement of page breaks. Next to the Web Manuals Headings you can decide in the drop-down menu to match them with a Word heading. This mapping is flexible, as multiple Word headings can be selected to match a single Web Manuals heading. In addition, default heading matches can be deselected and reconfigured as needed.
Note: When a page break is selected for a specific heading (e.g., Heading 2), a page break is inserted before every instance of that heading.
Configure Styles
The new import functionality now allows for transferring more stylings, such as font size and color. Similar to heading configuration, the Configure Styles step allows editors to mix and match styles from a Word document to Web Manuals:
Editors will be able to select Web Manuals styles already available in the site’s design from the dropdown menu.
When the system recognizes a style that is available in Word but missing in Web Manuals, editors have two options:
- Add Style: This option prompts a new window for naming the style. A preview of the values included in the new style is shown.
Note: This functionality is available to Admins only, and the Web Manuals Designer must be available on the site.
2. Ignore: This means no Web Manuals style will be matched to the Word style. The style will still be reflected in the content's page source.
The system will also signal to the user if a match between Word styles and Web Manuals styles has been found.
Other Settings
The new Word Import retains features from the previous version, including the ability to leave a blank page at the start of the document, ignore all margins, and remove all empty paragraphs. Additionally, the new functionalities include:
Remove all empty lines: The Remove all empty lines function removes all empty lines from the source Word document.
Replace Table of Content with Table of Content Module: The Replace Table of Content (TOC) with TOC Content Module option ensures that a native Word TOC module is replaced by a Web Manuals TOC module. However, manually created TOCs will not be replaced. If a TOC has a list applied to it in the Word document, it will not be recognized or replaced; in this case, the list must be removed from the source document before the import.
Replace List of Effective Pages with List of Effective Pages Module: This functionality replaces an existing List of Effective Pages (LEP) in the source document with the Web Manuals LEP module in the newly imported document. A LEP can be detected when a document contains a heading of any level (h1-h8) with the text "List of effective page", OR when a table is present directly under that heading.
Note: If a document contains multiple LEPs, only the first instance will be replaced.
Guess Headings for TOC: The Guess headings for TOC settings identify headings for the table of contents based on the original document's numbering. For example, a single number (e.g., 1 or 1.) is identified as Heading 1, while a two-part number (e.g., 1.1 or 1.1.) is identified as Heading 2. This pattern continues for subsequent levels. The presence or absence of a trailing period does not affect the heading level. For instance, a number followed by a text string (e.g., 1 Text string) is also a valid Heading 1 without a period.
Use Web Manuals overflow system to split pages: The new import feature now utilizes the Web Manuals overflow system. This new method calculates how much content fits on a single page and then inserts page breaks accordingly.
Ignore inline styles from Word: prevents any inline HTML styling from being imported from Word into the page content’s source. This includes custom source styles such as font size, text color, and line height. Styling elements such as text alignment, font weight, font style, and text decoration will still be imported
Table Settings
The Ignore table margins setting ensure a consistent and clean appearance by disregarding original table margins.
Collapse Table Borders: It allows the imported tables to have borders consisting of a single pixel. When the option is not selected, some borders will still collapse; i.e., borders that are collapsed in Word do collapse, while tables with "Allow cell spacing" enabled will remain uncollapsed.
Adjust Cell Padding: Editors now have the ability to customize cell padding directly from the import window. This new feature allows for precise adjustments to the spacing of the top, bottom, left, and right sides of table cells.
Structure Preview
Once all desired settings have been selected, pressing the Update Structure button will display a loading screen.
After loading is complete, the preview will be divided into two views. The Pages and Table of Contents view displays the page structure and TOC before the document is actually added to a site.
Now you can click Import and then Reload at the top of the page to see the document imported:
If you are looking into importing a manual without the various configuration settings, you can use the Quick Import feature.