RE: How to Tame Long Word Doc with Multiple Styles?

[Sanjay Srikonda <SSrikonda -at- invlink -dot- com>]

This is a dilemma, I'm sure some of have faced in the past.  The first
question you need to do is assess how much leeway you have in terms of time
and how much of it you have to pore over the document.

You may want to set up a new template, with the styles you wish to use, 

Heading 1 (for titles: In RoboHelp terms, topics)
Heading 2 (for secondary titles)
Heading 3 (for sections)

and so on

Then, import the document by sections.  Is the document fine as written to
keep it as ONE document?  Would reorganizing it into disparate documents be
a way to go?  Would it be possible to reorder the document into how the user
will interact with it?  Perhaps a "technical" document and an "end-user"
document and a "setup" document.  All of which would possibly call for
disparate documents without having to deal with the one large document.

One thing to note, if you're using word, and you are talking about large
documents, be very careful as to the size of the document you're using, Word
tends to choke at anything approaching 20 Megabytes.  I'm sure others on the
list will agree that keeping document sizes small will only help you in the
long run.  Personally, if my document is approaching 1Mb, then I look at
ways I can reorganize it.

If the document is all TXT and not RTF any more, have you lost all your
styles any way and will have to reapply them again?  So, this would be a
great opportunity to reorganize it as well.  Do a little document mapping
see if it is fine the the way it reads currently or can it be reworked to
flow better?

But, that's my .02 (american)

sanjay

One question what are steps 1 and 2?  

<snip>
From: Robert Kennedy [mailto:deutschtoenglish -at- yahoo -dot- com]

Hello All,

I need to reformat and edit a mess of a document.
It's about 200 pages and has been cobbled together by
non-tech writers from at LEAST 5 disparate sources.
(It's on network security.)

The "security" guy who did the pasting says that
he's had it -- every time he tries to insert text
into a part of the document, "something disappears."
(It's been converted to Text, not RTF, and it will
have to be posted on the web.) Unfortunately, I have
not worked with many long Word documents before.
</snip>

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