Problem with index markers and importing MS Word 2007 files

Report · Jun 09, 2010

This was ugly in that it wasn't caught until after a book had been typeset and the index was being finalized. I'm now having to go back and manually insert a zillion index markers. Not fun.

This was my first project since migrating from FM 7.1 to FM9.0.3.

Source documents are Microsoft Word 2007. Am working in Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit.

When the Word files were imported into FrameMaker, only SOME of the index markers were imported. The difference between those that were imported and those that weren't was seemingly random.

I did some testing and found the problem and a solution.

Looking at the source Word .docx file, and displaying hidden text shows two types of index markers:

1. { XE "word to be indexed"}

2. {xe "word to be indexed"}

Note the difference in case and the extra space after the opening brace in #1. Markers of type 1 were imported fine. Markers of type 2 were stripped by the import process.

The solution:

Backsave the Word file to Word 2003 format (.doc) before importing into FrameMaker.

I backsaved to Word 2003 and imported using both the "Microsoft Word" and "Microsoft Word 2007" filters and both filters imported correctly. It's only when trying to import a Word 2007 .docx file directly that things run amok.

Grr...

Report · Jun 11, 2010

Thank you for posting your solution, Dan. It's cold comfort, but I've also ran into this issue in the past, almost certainly well before Word2003 though, probably as far back as Word2000 or earlier.

In your testing, did you try saving as RTF to see if the markers were homogenized, by any chance? In my simple testing just now, Word itself recognized the index field correctly no matter whether I changed the field to "xe" or "XE", but FM's import of the .docx file format wouldn't recognize "xe", only "XE". But importing an RTF file handled both upper- and lower-case entries.

Ah, yes, that's it -- saving the Word2007 file as RTF (with 2 fields, one caps, one lower-case) changed cap field to lower-case when the RTF is opened in Word again, so saving as RTF does homogenize the fields to lower-case. Is it possible that your file(s) were changed to or saved as RTF at any point in their life-cycle? I believe some older versions of Word were actually RTF under the hood, too -- if you do Save As in Word2007 you can scroll through the File Type entries and see "Word 97-2002 & 6.0/95 - RTF (*.doc)" I believe some doc management systems change binaries to RTF too, or conversely some apps create RTF but they name the files as doc.

So Word itself recognizes either lower- or upper-case, and FM's RTF import handles both, but not the .docx import.

Sheila