Section numbering compatibility with MS Word

[Purpendicular]

Two possibly related issues.

I write in Nisus Writer Pro but have to export to MS Word .doc format. My sections are numbered in Nisus. When I "save as" in .doc format, the section numbering works fine when I open the converted document with Nisus. But when I open the same .doc document in MS Word 2004 and 2008, only the last digit appears. Thus, section 7.27.1. becomes "1.".

Possibly related to this is that I have manually inserted a page break before each Heading 1 so that each chapter starts on a new page. Thus, in Nisus I have "page break" -> "'Number' Text of heading". For example "Page Break", "1. Introduction".

When I open this .doc document in Word I instead get "Number", "page break", "Text of heading". The heading number is placed before the page break instead of after it. It sort of ends the previous chapter instead of being shown at the beginning of the new one.

I include two screen dumps that show this.

Finally, I asked a while back if it would be possible to include a page break in a style definition, like in MS Word, so that chapters automatically start on a new page. The answer I received was "good idea". Have you any plans regarding this?

[martin]

I write in Nisus Writer Pro but have to export to MS Word .doc format. My sections are numbered in Nisus. When I "save as" in .doc format, the section numbering works fine when I open the converted document with Nisus. But when I open the same .doc document in MS Word 2004 and 2008, only the last digit appears. Thus, section 7.27.1. becomes "1.".

Saving as ".doc" is always going to be more compatible than an "export" as. As for the numbers changing from "7.27.1" to just "1", I wasn't able to reproduce this. Can you send me a sample document, or attach it here? Thanks.

Possibly related to this is that I have manually inserted a page break before each Heading 1 so that each chapter starts on a new page. Thus, in Nisus I have "page break" -> "'Number' Text of heading". For example "Page Break", "1. Introduction".

When I open this .doc document in Word I instead get "Number", "page break", "Text of heading". The heading number is placed before the page break instead of after it.

Unfortunately Word does not consider a page break to end/delimit a paragraph (you can test this by triple-clicking in Word to select by paragraph; you can see it treats the break as a normal character). Thus Word will not place list/paragraph numbers after a break. We think this behavior is silly, but there's not much we can do about it.

Finally, I asked a while back if it would be possible to include a page break in a style definition, like in MS Word, so that chapters automatically start on a new page. The answer I received was "good idea". Have you any plans regarding this?

No progress or definite plans on this feature, but we still think it's a good idea.

[Purpendicular]

I have sent you a file to look at by email.

"Export as" gave the same results as "save as".

[martin]

Thank you for the sending along your sample file. We've reproduced the problem with the list numbers not showing in Word properly, and we'll take a look at fixing it.

In the meantime, you can workaround the problem. The cause of the issue is that you are enforcing the "1.2." number format via a "Custom List Bullet" attribute (as part of your paragraph styles), ie: your heading style has "Numbered List" style + "Custom List Bullet" applied. Instead of that, you could just have "Tiered List" style and no custom bullet. That will transfer into Word properly, and is probably the cleaner approach anyways.

[Bob Stern]

Purpendicular: Instead of saving as DOC, can you simply send your Nisus RTF file to your colleagues who use Word? RTF is one of Word's native document formats, so Word can edit and save RTF documents without converting them to DOC. When I send Nisus RTF documents to Word users, they always accept them as Word documents. (However, I haven't viewed the documents on a Windows computer to see if there is any difference.)