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shgstewart
Inspiring
August 14, 2018
Question

Spacing issues in Word output

  • August 14, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 334 views

I'm trying to generate Word output for a large help project (over 300 pages in Word format) and a lot of the spacing is messed up -- there are no spaces between paragraphs, or double spaces between list items (e.g. instead of looking like

  • item
  • item
  • item

lists look like

  • item
  • item
  • item)

or sometimes list spacing is inconsistent, so that some entries are double-spaced and some are not.  There also seem to be issues with the CSS not applying consistently to the Word version, as well.  I'm looking at Peter Grainge's thing about mapping Word styles to CSS, but I'm not sure I totally understand it.

Has anyone else had this kind of issue?  How do I fix it?  I really need a clean output, because my boss is getting angry about it, and I don't know enough about RH to troubleshoot it myself.

Thanks in advance.

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1 reply

Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Peter GraingeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 14, 2018

Essentially it comes down to what styles you have applied in RoboHelp, if any. Maybe some paragraphs if clicked in show Normal and others show None.

From what you say, you must be mapping to a Word template and mapping is simply saying this style in my RoboHelp project is to look like this style in the Word template. That doesn't seem to be working so I wonder what is set up in your project. Find a couple of paragraphs with the wrong spacing in Word and in RoboHelp see if the style is the same as ones with the right spacing.

It can also occur, if the Word styles have spacing before and after but are set to exclude spacing between paragraphs of the same style. Then it can vary if in one place there are two Normal paragraphs and in another Normal is before or after something else.

On lists, it pays to apply Normal as well as the list style.

On the forum your lists look the same. Maybe screenshots would be better.

What version of RoboHelp and Word?

Try selecting a CSS file at the end of the configuration to see if that helps or hinders.

See www.grainge.org for free RoboHelp and Authoring information.

@petergrainge

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