Conversion Table not resulting in correct structure

[QuintinSeegers]

Is there an alternative to using a Conversion Table to apply structure to an unstructured document?

I have a simple document, with 3 headings and a table:

(So the paragraphs styles are easilty identified, the text is the actual paragraph style applied)

In the EDD that will be used, each Heading is a new Section. Tables are children to a Section. The expected Structure should be:

Section

  Heading

  Section

   Heading

   Table

Using the following Conversion Table:

I get the following result:

When the result should be:

[Russ Ward]

Hi Quintin, it definitely takes experimentation and never comes out completely perfect. As Rick said in another thread, it should get you close but some cleanup is always necessary. The good news is that it only happens once.

It has been a long time since I did this so I don't remember the exact details. However, I think maybe you need the "promote" mechanism for your table. Try putting this in the second column for the T:tst Table with Shaded Text row:

FieldList (promote)

I vaguely remember dealing with this way back when and that's what I have in my old conversion table.

Hope this helps,

Russ

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

One problem is you're mapping T:FieldList to a Section.

Unless Section is defined as a Table, then it won't leverage what Fm "knows" about tables.

-Matt

[QuintinSeegers]

Is there a way around that, or will it be a manual correction that is needed?

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Anything from a T: should map to a Table element, not a Container element.

[Lynne A. Price]

Quintin,

   Did you create your conversion table with Structure > Utilities > Generate Conversion Table? That command gives you a start, but it is essentially just a list of elements and results in a pretty flat structure. In the conversion table you included in your original message, only two of the entries in the first column contain more than one element. In particular, you've defined an S3 Section to consist only of an H3 Heading, an S2 Section to consist of an H2NTOC Heading followed by a single S3 Section, and an S1 Seection to consist of to consist of an H1NTOC Heading followed by one or more S2 Sections. 

   In a typical conversion table, the first column in a row usually is very similar to the general rule for that element in the EDD, with qualifiers added as needed. Since you've mentioned elements named Paragraph, NumberedList, and BulletedList in other threads,

   I don't know what your general rules for sections are, but I would expect the three rows for sections to be something like:

   I sometimes find it useful to develop a conversion table in stages, starting with test documents rather than actual documents. For example, in this case, I might create a test document consisting of only Paragraph and Section elements and start my conversion table only with those elements. Once I could correctly structure nested sections, I might add single-level lists, then, nested lists, and then tables.

  Something else I notice in your example is the paragraph formats named H1NTOC and H2NTOC. Are these used for headings of sections that are not entered into the table of contents? Do you also have H1 and H2 for sections of the respective levels that do have TOC entries? If so, your strutured documents will need to indicate whether or not a section has a TOC entry. I would probably do that with an attribute on the Section element (attribute values can be specified in the second column of the conversion table).

   --Lynne

[QuintinSeegers]

I've gone back to basics with a very simple document, created a Conversion Table from it (Structure > Utilities > Create Conversion Table). So far I got the following structuring correctly:

• Bullet List (multi-level)
• Paragraphs
• Headings
• Sections

At the moment I'm working on structuring tables. An old tread (https://community.adobe.com/t5/framemaker/conversion-table-edd-handling-multiple-table-formats/td-p/...), to which you've replied, has been very helpful with this.