nisus.com

I'm working on a book written in Word 04 on a Mac.

No graphics or tables, no images at all. Just paragraphs of formatted text, formatted using six different styles.

Styles and page layout load perfectly into Pages 08 and export perfectly too...

But When NWPro imports that Word Doc: styles while listed don't import properly, some formatting lost, paragraph margins in particular. The styles appear in the styles palette but aren't configured correctly. The individual paragraphs are tagged with the style in question but the margins have been changed. Paragraph and font characteristics are generally correct bar font color, but size, leading and space after preserved. That all noted, it's a very simple if lengthy document and I've not fully implemented (yet) all that we intend doing.

It'll be a pain resetting paragraph margins each time we swap a file.

I'm hoping to go back and forth with the author with a Word File as the exchange format and I'll need to preserve styles. Do I have to stick with Pages here? Is there something I can do?

Tommy,

I know this is not the answer you want to hear, but in my experience, NWP's import of Word documents (.doc) is not really that good (it's basically based on AbiConverter). However, it's import of RTF (which is Word's other native format is really good. I've never lost a style in an .rtf document, but I've lost a lot when I opened that same document as an saved in Word's binary and closed format.

Most anything that can be done in .doc can be done equally as well in .rtf (as a matter of fact, Microsoft's new .docx converter for Word 2004 simply translates a .docx document into an .rtf -- not much is lost at all, if anything -- change tracking, images, captions, tables, styles, comments, all stay intact).

If you absolutely have to keep .doc as the format of exchange, I can't help you. But know that when NWP saves as a Word document, it simply takes an .rtf and changes its file extension to .doc, although this may have changed in later versions. Word allows this, as it can read .doc files that are in binary format (0's and 1's, which is the actual .doc file format) or it can read .rtf's that have simply been given a .doc extenstion (not in binary format). I would wager, especially with the simplicity of your document, that you will lose absolutely nothing by using .rtf. And if your friend is on a machine that only has Word (especially a Windows machine), it will open up by default in Word unless he or she has changed it. Word speaks .rtf (especially the brand that Nisus spits out) natively.

I know this doesn't solve your problem, but I hope it gives you some understanding of how all of this works in NWP. In my experience, if you want to work in .doc and cannot for whatever reason use .rtf, Pages is the much better choice. As a matter of fact, it is my default program for the opening and saving of Word documents, but it has its own problems - namely, that you have to export the document everytime.

Good luck,

Scott

Thanks Scott for your thorough, and thoughtful reply. I appreciate it.

I did pretty well as you suggested, I didn't have time to fully research this one, so I went with Pages on my end.

The other writer wouldn't be able to cope... with much....

I am going to fully check out the RTF exchange which would be more appealing to me, I'd sooner write and style in NWPro over Pages. That said, Pages did work very well.