Newbie Word Conversion question

Hi there,

I am brand new to ISilo and actually have a question about converting Word documents. I have a long-ish document (35 pages) with a table of contents hyperlinked to other places within the document (pretty standard). I am trying to convert it with iSiloX.

The first time I tried, the document retained the links but it was all one long page. (Apparently iSiloX cannot handle Word's page breaks.) So then I learned to save each page as a separate file and add them all in sequence to get multiple pages in an iSilo document. That worked great for my multi-page problem, but now my TOC links don't work.

Does anyone know what to do about this? I am in no way a programmer, so I have no idea how to whip up a little script or work the magic you all normally do. Is there something common sense I am missing? Is this an impossible dream?

Thanks in advance for any help!
RT

[Alexander Turcic]

RT (please register, it only takes 30 seconds and of course it is free),

How did you feed iSilo with your Word document? Did you convert the Word document to html first? I suggest you save your Word document from within Word as (clean) html, and then use iSiloX to parse this html file. Normally that should work fine.

Tell us if you need more help!

Alex

[Taubman]

Originally Posted by Alexander

RT (please register, it only takes 30 seconds and of course it is free),

How did you feed iSilo with your Word document? Did you convert the Word document to html first? I suggest you save your Word document from within Word as (clean) html, and then use iSiloX to parse this html file. Normally that should work fine.

Tell us if you need more help!

Alex

...basically because it won't convert straight from Word to iSilo. So I saved the Word document as html, and then fed it (!) to iSiloX.

I tired it both ways too,

1) first saving each page as a separate Word file, then saving as html, then converting to iSilo, and
2) saving the entire Word document as html, then saving each page separately, then converting to iSilo.

It didn't seem to like it either way.

RT

[Alexander Turcic]

RT,

The problem is how Word generally converts .doc file to .html:

1) when you save each page as a separate document, Word does not keep track of the TOC anymore. The hyperlinks would be lost.

2) when you convert the entire .doc to .html in Word, your document becomes de facto a single continuous page. A page break in your original word becomes a <br> in the converted .html (and <br> only inserts a single carriage return).

You may want to play with the Document -> Page Boundaries settings of you iSiloX channel. I don't think this would solve, but it is worth a try!

Greets

Alex

[Taubman]

OK, not to beat a dead horse, but a few more questions...

1) Do you think it would make a difference if I had a list of bookmarked links I made up myself vs. the standard Word table of contents? I did a draft where I used my own (manually-created) links on my own.

2) Do you think anything on the iSiloX tabs would help? I nosed around in the 'Bookmark' tab and found 2 options: one called 'HTML file' which looks like it would resolve all your bookmarks to one file (is that true?) and another called 'Named Anchors' which looks much more promising, but I cna't seem to get it to do anything for me. Do you know how 'Named Anchors' works?

3) I don't mean to sound like an idiot, but I''m not sure what you are referring to when you say 'channel'

Thanks for your continued help and patience,
RT

[Alexander Turcic]

RT,

I am happy if I can help, so don't worry

With 'channel' I generally mean an entry in iSiloX, for instance your converted html file which you process in iSiloX would be referred to as a channel.

Back to your question. I must admit you caught me here with something I have never tried myself before. Do you a sample Word document for me with a TOC and hyperlinks? I would work on it and see how we could properly convert it with iSiloX.

Greets,

Alex

[jasondv]

1) Do you think it would make a difference if I had a list of bookmarked links I made up myself vs. the standard Word table of contents? I did a draft where I used my own (manually-created) links on my own.

I think so. I have long, single-page documents that I cleaned up and formatted first in Word and then saved to html. I just inserted my own bookmarks in the places I needed them (using MS Word), and then clicked the box for generating bookmarks based on "Named anchors" (which can also be the usual bookmarks found in an html document).

2) Do you think anything on the iSiloX tabs would help? I nosed around in the 'Bookmark' tab and found 2 options: one called 'HTML file' which looks like it would resolve all your bookmarks to one file (is that true?) and another called 'Named Anchors' which looks much more promising, but I cna't seem to get it to do anything for me. Do you know how 'Named Anchors' works?

No, it doesn't resolve all your bookmarks to one file. What I do is create a TOC page, where the hyperlinks to the other pages are. Then I use that page as a source, and click on the "HTML file" box and point to that same file to tell iSiloX to generate my bookmarks based on the links in that page. Then I convert that page with link depth set to "1" and I get all the linked pages as well, with a list of bookmarks generated from that same page.

Hope this helps.

[Taubman]

Hi there,

I just wanted to say thanks to you, Alex & Jason. After some trial & error and piecing together what I learned from you and what I could gather from the iSilo web site, I am cautiously optimistic that I have solved my problem. Here's what I did (the short version):

1. Saved each page of my Word doc as a separate file. (Yes, this was a pain.)
2. Saved each Word file as an html file, except for the one which held the TOC. (Also a pain.)
3. Set up the Word file with the TOC to contain hyperlinks that point to the individual html files.
4. Saved that TOC file as an html file.
5. Loaded up the title page of the doc (not referred to in the TOC) and then the TOC into iSiloX.
6. Set the conversion preferences (these are what you mean by channels?) under 'Bookmarks' to the 'Named Anchors' setting, from which I checked 'All'.*
7. Converted & voila! i now have an iSilo document with the proper TOC links, outside hyperlinks, AND the proper number of pages.

*I think I had to do this because I had some pages later on the document that had hyperlinks to outside web sites. For this reason I also set my link depth to 3 layers. I'm not sure if this was necessary, but it seemed to work.

Thank you again! I appreciate you help,
RT

[jasondv]

You're welcome. I learned a lot from the other folks here, and I'm glad to have been able to "pay it forward."