Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

[Guest]

When I generate the print doc, my base Bullet and Number styles appear with an indent of .25 inches instead of indent of .75 inches which is in the template. Seems that regardless of what I try, the two base list styles have the wrong indent. If I then select a bulleted paragraph in the generated doc, and apply the Bullet style, the paragraph moves over to the correct indent, so the Word doc (and template) have the correct indent entered. It just isn't applying it to the initial indent of the paragraphs when the doc is generated.

When I right-click the corrected bullet para and select "Update Bullet to match selection" in the menu, all the bullets move over, but if I try that with the numbers, I lose all the Restart at 1 settings from topic to topic.

I have tried 1) Deleting Style Mapping.dot in the project to insure no interference between it and Style Mapping.dot in the User\App Data\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates folder. 2) Copying Style Mapping.dot to a new template name (Experiment Style Mapping.dot) and increasing the paragraph indent settings and list alignment settings for the list styles hopefully to overwrite any previous settings [and then selecting the new template to generate. New template confirmed linked to generated doc] 3)Basing the Bullet and Number styles on No Style rather than on Normal (their text lined up with Normal text, so I was trying to disassociate them from the Normal style).

None of these changes has had any effect on initially generated indents of Bullet and Number text. I am out of ideas. Does anyone have any idea of what I need to do to change the indents of these styles as generated?

Thanks,

John

[Peter Grainge]

I understand you find this way simpler than my way of doing it but have you tried the latter? I am not guaranteeing it will work for you but it did in my tests.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Peter, frankly I don’t understand what difference you refer to between your way and mine, especially since I have tried several different things since I first wrote you. When I was using the Style Mapping template in the project, I could not see Word styles with numbering, but now that I am using the template in the …\Microsoft\Templates folder, Word styles with numbering do show up in the Printed Doc wizard in Robohelp. So I am linking to all my custom Word styles.

One difference is that you are only describing the creation of one list style, while I have about 6 to deal with, 3 each of bulleted and numbered styles. You link your list style to Word’s built in List style. Are you saying that you think using the built in style(s) work better than trying to use custom styles?

I came up with one more idea last night. I am going to create “bogus” list styles in the template and base my Bullet and Number styles on them. Since the styles based on Bullet and Number were generated correctly, I’m hoping that basing Bullet and Number on other list styles will cause Bullet and Number to be generated correctly as well.

I also got a suggestion from MS Word MVP to use Format Painter to reset numbering to 1 when resetting finally stops working. So I may have an option to go ahead and fix all the numbering manually if I cannot make Robo generate the styles pristinely.

John

From: Peter Grainge

Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 1:17 AM

To: John Dawson

Subject: Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

Re: Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

created by Peter Grainge<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Peter+Grainge> in Printed Documentation - View the full discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/3976859#3976859

[Peter Grainge]

Did you say before that you were trying to map multiple list styles? If you did, my apologies for not picking up on that here.

So in RoboHelp you will have six list styles (and I emphasise list, not paragraph). I haven't tested but I think if you apply the requisite list styles to each list plus the paragraph style ListMapping to all of those lists, then map ListMapping to List, you list styles will come through OK. I know mapping all the list to one style sounds illogical but that is only the paragraph part rather than the list part.

Also in Print Issues on my site there is now a method sent to me that you may want to look at. See Numbering continues instead of restarting at 1. I'm not sure it is the right solution for you so take a look and discard it if it does not seem applicable.

If you cannot get it working, create a new RoboHelp project and create six list styles in it that have the appearance you want. In just two or three topics create lists that use all the styles. Zip that up and send it to me as per the instructions on my site, using any service you like. I will try to look at it but I have some deadlines before being unavailable for a while.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

Peter,

After working on this for several days I was about to give up but finally generated a version that was close enough to correct that I do not have to restart the primary number style at the start of each topic (of a 600 p. doc).

I fixed the indent problem (every list style appeared at an indent of .25” regardless of the indent settings in the Style Mapping template) by moving the left margin from 1.25” to 1.75” and moving the indent of the Normal style (and heading styles & etc) from .5” to 0”. The primary number style still appears at .25”, but it is now correctly indented in relation to Normal. Correcting the indents of the bullet styles and indenting and renumbering the secondary numbered styles is easy enough that this is an acceptable solution for me.

I did not try the entire solution given in your previous reply, but I did map one of my list styles (Number) to the List style in Word with no improvement. Unless there is something special about the style name “ListMapping”, I don’t believe that using it instead of “Number” would have made any improvement.

I did manage to find a way to map Robo list styles to numbered styles in Word. I first created the Word styles as unnumbered & mapped them in the print wizard, creating a throw-away version of the doc. Then I added numbering to the Number, Bullet, & etc. styles in the template. I completed the wizard again, being careful not to re-open the template, and the now numbered Word styles still appeared in the Robo print wizard.

After trying every concievable combination of indents and other settings in Word, I believe that the Robo style mapping script in RoboHelp 8 is just full of bugs. I am afraid that the result I have now is about the best I can do.

Thanks for your help,

John

From: Peter Grainge

Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 11:08 AM

To: John Dawson

Subject: Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

Re: Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

created by Peter Grainge<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Peter+Grainge> in Printed Documentation - View the full discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/3977803#3977803

[Peter Grainge]

John

I am sorry it didn't work out for you. Just one point, I notice you are still referring to mapping your RoboHelp list style whereas the key to my method is that the list style has a paragraph style superimposed on it and it is that paragraph style that gets mapped.

My availability is limited for a while but I would be quite happy to look into this further for you later on.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Guest]

I only refered to “Robo list styles” because writing “Robo paragraph styles that are associated with lists” seems overly wordy and unnecessary since we both understand that it is the paragraph styles that get mapped.

One of the changes that I made in my CSS, that didn’t work, was to move the left indent attribute from the (actual) list style into the (paragraph) list style for each list item. It made no difference in where the list appeared in Word. (Imagine my surprise.)

Thank you for your offer to look at this again. If I get completely blocked after the next release, I might accept. A couple of things that are preventing me from changing to your method are 1) Not enough info. Does it matter how you format that List style in Word? What left indent did you use? and mostly 2) Using your method, everything would have to turn out absolutely perfectly, because there would be no usable (individual) list styles in Style Mapping.dot. And I have no faith that I would ever be able to generate a doc that didn’t need some fiddling with.

Thanks,

John

From: Peter Grainge

Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 6:48 PM

To: John Dawson

Subject: Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

Re: Cannot generate print doc with correct indents of base list styles

created by Peter Grainge<http://forums.adobe.com/people/Peter+Grainge> in Printed Documentation - View the full discussion<http://forums.adobe.com/message/3996438#3996438