Word for multi-platform publication?

[Scott Meyers]

I want to create a document that I can render on different output devices that
have different sizes and capabilities, e.g., monochrome PDF for paper
publication, color PDF with the same page size for reading on a computer screen,
monochrome PDF of a different page size for Kindle publication, color PDF of yet
a different page size for iPhone publication. (Kindles and iPhones don't
actually care much for PDF files, but please ignore that and focus on the
general motivation for multiple output formats.) Does Word offer support for
this kind of multi-platform publication?

It seems to me that there are two fundamental issues: (1) page dimensions and
(2) style definitions. Regarding page dimensions, I'm thinking it might be
possible to create Word templates (.dot files) that contain nothing but page
dimension information (including things like offsets for running headers and
footers, etc.). Let's call these "page dimension templates." If this is
possible, changing the page size for the document would require nothing more
than linking it to a different page dimension template. Is this a workable idea?

Regarding style definitions, I'm committed to use styles throughout the
document, but I may want different definitions of a single style for color and
monochrome devices. For example, for color devices I may want character style A
to print red and character style B to print blue, but for monochrome devices,
I'd want A to print underlined and B to print bold. (The document itself would
simply specify whether text should use style A or B.) A complicating factor
here is that if I were to decide to change, say, the font I'm using everywhere
(on both color and monochrome devices), I'd want to change it in one place, but
have that change reflected in the style definitions for both color and
monochrome devices. So I want to have a "master" style for A that can be
overridden, in part, by "derived" versions of A that change only, say, the font
color or boldness or underlinedness. Does Word offer a way to do this?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Scott

 

[Graham Mayor]

One possibility that might work for you is to save your document content as
an autotext entry.
You could then create templates that contain the page layouts that you
require each using the same style names that you have used in the document,
but with the different configurations you require for your different
layouts. Create a new blank document from the template then insert the
autotext entry. You could even create an autonew macro to automatically
insert the autotext when you create that new document.
I can foresee problems with headers/footers etc but it may get you started.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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