Word Formatting Styles Removing "Char" for Robohelp

[ManualWriter]

I have discovered, by accident, the much dreaded "Char" problem in MS
Word 2002. When I have copy/pasted a section which is formatted with
the same style from one document to the other, "Char" is added to the
name of the style. Because of this, some text appears to be in the
original formatting "Normal Text" and the corrupted text is in the new
formatting "Normal Text Char." The straight forward deletion of the
word "Char" of course, does not solve the problem.

I am going to be making an HTML help system with my word documents
through RoboHelp, and from my research, the text styles from Word need
to be consistent.

Is there a way to fix this Char problem and return my document to it's
original formatting before I convert it in Robohelp? I will have
approximately 1200 pages to deal with between a few documents!

I've thought of just copy/pasting the entire document into notepad and
then back to my style template in Word and re-applying the formatting,
but with the volume I'm looking at, that will be very time-consuming.
I also have a number of more complicated styles, which would be
time-consuming to re-create if I'm going to delete all of the
corrupted styles to start over.

I'm hoping that someone knows how to return my styles to the original
formatting. Or, maybe I'm wrong, and the Char styles won't interfere
with Robohelp! Please give me some advise on this. Thanks!

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi ManualWriter,

What do you mean, more specifically, with "copy/paste a section"? Do you
literally mean a Word section?

Because when I run a quick test, copying text with the same style name
but different definition from one document to another I don't see this
problem. The pasted text acquires the style name and formatting of that
style in the target document, and no "Char" style is created.

I have discovered, by accident, the much dreaded "Char" problem in MS
Word 2002. When I have copy/pasted a section which is formatted with
the same style from one document to the other, "Char" is added to the
name of the style. Because of this, some text appears to be in the
original formatting "Normal Text" and the corrupted text is in the new
formatting "Normal Text Char." The straight forward deletion of the
word "Char" of course, does not solve the problem.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Sep 30 2003)
http://www.mvps.org/word

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