A very poor import into Publisher. Styles headaches

[charlesbewlay]

I just imported a perfectly styled Word 2021 document into a new document (with all styles deleted.) First screenshot shows the Word document, the second what I get in Publisher.

The problems are numerous.

1. Normal styled paras (that I've used for the basic text), are replaced with Normal 1, changing the character colour, but nothing else. I would like to change all Normal 1 to just Normal, but there is no way that I can see for making such a change with Find and Replace. Manually would be an impossibly lengthy and error-prone operation. Or should I not use Normal in Word, and change to something like Text?

2. The heading 3 becomes just weird, as shown. Even when I click on the paragrraph style it's almost as bad, just changes to 0.0.1

3. The Table title heading  style (which has now become Table Title 1 I'd already delete unused styles), and show the weird stuff with SEQ and Arabic.

4. Lastly the tables, which have styles in them too, are just a mess as shown – even wrong font. And the row spacing is destroyed.

And in general, even after deleting unused styles, I have endless extra List bullet and List numbered styles, but they all seem to be numbered 9, and not 1-8, but deleting unused hasn't deleted them, so where are they, and why do they exist?

I'm glad I don't have an external deadline, just mine (to get paid!).

All help highly welcome, very highly.

[charlesbewlay]

Two updates.

re 1: I changed all Normal to TEXT in Word, and reimported. That gives me the correct import of that style.
Now I see that ALL styles, except one appear as a subset of Normal 1. The exception is called 'caption' and it also appears under Normal 1, but here the table and fig titles are subsetted under it.

re 3: All that SEQ Arabic stuff with table and fig titles has disappeared in new import: I did nothing. Relates to Normal/Normal 1?

[thomaso]

On 1/15/2024 at 11:37 AM, charlesbewlay said:

Normal styled paras (that I've used for the basic text), are replaced with Normal 1,

If styles get added on import with same name but an additional number it may indicate that the imported document contains different definitions for an applied style with that name.

On 1/15/2024 at 12:21 PM, charlesbewlay said:

I changed all Normal to TEXT in Word, and reimported. 

(…) I did nothing.

"I changed all" & "I did nothing" sounds contradictory to me. I wonder whether in Word …

… all visual appearing formatting is saved identically in its applied style
… no style appears visually that is not also saved as a style with that visual appearing definition.

• Are in Word character styles used or paragraph styles only?
• If you select a text character in APub does its style name in the context toolbar or the paragraph panel display a + symbol after the name?

On 1/15/2024 at 11:37 AM, charlesbewlay said:

I would like to change all Normal 1 to just Normal, but there is no way that I can see for making such a change with Find and Replace.

In the "Find And Replace" panel click on the cog icon and chose a style option, for instance to open the menu of available paragraph styles …

[charlesbewlay]

Thanks Thomas. I hadn't seen the Find and Replace cog before, even though I've used in plenty of others before.

The heading numbering styles are still a mess. I've tried fixing them in the Bullets and Numbering under the Paragraphs tab, but it doesn't work with putting in level 2, just retains level 1. See screenshot.

When I say 'did' nothing' re Arabic I mean, more accurately, to say 'I had done nothing'. Another import put them in again then. I'm now deleting table numbers in Word, one by one as there is something weird in Word, and that is fixing this.

But the table formatting being a mess: any clues on that?

[thomaso]

14 hours ago, charlesbewlay said:

When I say 'did' nothing' re Arabic I mean, more accurately, to say 'I had done nothing'. Another import put them in again then. I'm now deleting table numbers in Word, one by one as there is something weird in Word, and that is fixing this.

I did understand it that way (and edited my previous post by adding the two "I") – in my understanding: if "I changed all Normal to TEXT in Word" it can potentially influence the occurrence of the 'arabic' … as long we don't know that text that causes this oddity after import was not triggered for instance by special characters or style set in Word for the related spots in the text.

The fact that altering the Word doc did fix the 'arabic' issue seems to confirm my assumption of a possible culprit in Word. I'm wondering about the start of your initial thread description:

On 1/15/2024 at 11:37 AM, charlesbewlay said:

I just imported a perfectly styled Word 2021 document

Did "perfectly" refer to technical aspects or rather to visual like 'look', 'taste', 'feel' only?

14 hours ago, charlesbewlay said:

But the table formatting being a mess: any clues on that?

If I experience style issues I activate "Show Special Characters" (menu Text > bottom entry) to see where a possibly hidden, invisible character exists within the text and may influence text appearance or flow. (e.g. tab, line break, indent and many others). Also activating the option "Show Text Ruler" (menu View or Window) can help, e.g. to get tab or indent position markers displayed on the ruler above the text frame or to use it to set them at certain positions.

I am no expert for the auto-numbering feature but if I want to inspect style details I select specific text rather than the frame layer only. Note, a frame selection with the Move Tool doesn't report the style properties for all text but rather seems to report the settings for the top left position inside a frame (= the text cursor placed before the first character in a frame). To detect specific settings, especially character style options, it may even be required to move the text cursor from character to character (maybe even without selecting any) to get all settings reported (e.g. kerning). – So in your example I'd select the text "6. Reg" and check the settings again.

To avoid confusion it may be useful to create for any used formatting a saved style in the Text Styles panel. This way you get possible style deviation indicated in the various UI items as an additional '+' symbol after the style name. Also checking the text field at the top of the Text Styles panel may help to inspect all style properties and possible deviations. Unfortunately this field is tiny and can't get resized but as workaround you can choose to select all text in that field an copy/paste the content to a document page for easier overview and inspection.

For saved styles a summary of set style properties is listed at the bottom of the "Edit Text Style" dialog window. Also this content can get copied while its field can't get resized.