Importing to Mellel. docx etc.

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Bulow
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Posts: 161
Joined: Tue Nov 25, 2008 11:49 am
Location: Paris (sometimes Copenhagen)

Importing to Mellel. docx etc.

Post by Bulow »

There is a problem that has been souring my life with Mellel for many years. I had hoped that the new direct import of docx would solve it, but no.
The problem is the import of small caps and suprascript numbers. Small caps are rendered as normal letters and suprascript numbers as ordinary figures resting on the base-line. When you are importing, as I so often do, it is very time-consuming, and easy to make mistakes, when you have to go over the whole text and manually insert and correct. I understand where the problem originates, which is in the styles, exactly what is so attractive in Mellel: when you import you impose the styles you have defined for the kind of publication, but small caps and suprascripts are lost, while italics, fats and others remain, because they are defined as separate fonts. You can try to train contributors to use the special suprascript letters in Unicode to indicate 'second edition' and the like, but I have not found a similar way to deal with small caps.
Any suggestions?
Icelander
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Posts: 366
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2014 10:59 pm

Re: Importing to Mellel. docx etc.

Post by Icelander »

First, I assume by "suprascript"you mean superscript. Second, superscript characters, both digits and letters, are now converted correctly from .docx to Mellel 4. Third, you are right when you say that Small Caps are not displayed correctly after import from .docx.
Any suggestions?
If possible, try to use .doc or .rtf instead of .docx, because with those formats you can simply assign a color to all Small Caps in the Word document. You can then search for the color in Mellel and change everything to Small Caps and back to black.
If you really need the .docx format, then you can't use the color trick because Mellel changes the color value after import. (Details for those who are interested in PS.)

The solution is actually quite simple:
1) Before you export, make a global search in Word for Small Caps and then replace everything with "→found text←". This means arrows precede and follow all found text in Small Caps.
2) After import you enter the "Small Caps" attribute from the Character pane (Character -> Attributes -> Case) into the Find and Replace boxes.
3) Then search for "→Anything←" (without the quotes) and replace it with the 'Found Expression'.
4) And finally you search for: → or ← and replace it with an empty Replace box to delete the arrows. Done!

If you have to do this often, you create two Find Actions and run them together simultaneously in a FindSet. If you want, I can send you such a FindSet.
=--=-=--=-

PS
The standard value for the color red is RGB 255, 0, 0 in Mellel. This value can be found in Mellel. Therefore I tried to change the color value of red in Word before I exported a file as docx to match the said value. But after the document is imported into Mellel, it ALWAYS takes another value, which is RGB 251, 0,7. This value cannot be found in Mellel. I hesitate to call this a bug, but it definitely reveals a serious limitation in Mellel's search engine.
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