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Import of Word doc - paragraph breaks are not cleanly converted

Robert E_ Schneider

I have imported many documents from Word (.docx). It is the same for all:

The pargraph break at the end of paragraph that is used by Word seems to be different from Confluence's pargraph sign.

There is a line break in the Confluence page wherever there used to be paragraph break in the Word document. But it is not a "real" paragraph break.

For example:

This is the result of the import:

In order to make it appear right I must do this:
1. move the cursor on a line wich needs a paragraph break at its end

2. press the "End" button

3. press the "Return" button to create a "real Confluence" paragraph break

4. press the "Del" button to delete the imported Word paragraph break

Repeat 1-4 for each paragraph on the page.

After this treatment, the Confluence page will look like this:

Doing this manually is a real chore. Especially as I have hundres of pages to treat :-(

Is there a chance to do this with a Search/Replace function?

Why aren't the pargraph breaks converted correctly during the import, anyway?

Accepted answers

Bill Bailey

Yes, I have the seen annoyance. What is happening (don't know why) is that the end of paragraphs are getting a tag. Maybe this is a Confluence bug?

How I handle this is using the confluence-source-editor, then edit the page, and using RegEx find, replace all with tags.

If you have a long misbehaving document, I bring in the entire doc to one page so I can then clean it up quickly with the source editor, rather than allow Confluence to split on headings (which often don't exist in Word docs).

I think this affects docs that were properly formatted (paragraph spacing controlled by the style) and not when people control spacing like with a typewrite (two returns).

All comments

Davin Studer

I'm seeing the same behavior in my environment as well. A workaround, though not necessarily a great one, would be instead to attach the Word document to the page and embed it with the Word macro. That does show the paragraphs and line breaks correctly.

Bill Bailey

Yes, I have the seen annoyance. What is happening (don't know why) is that the end of paragraphs are getting a tag. Maybe this is a Confluence bug?

How I handle this is using the confluence-source-editor, then edit the page, and using RegEx find, replace all with tags.

I think this affects docs that were properly formatted (paragraph spacing controlled by the style) and not when people control spacing like with a typewrite (two returns).

Robert E_ Schneider

Well, I am afraid that this would impose new problems with that Word adapter and anyone who wants to edit the documents must have the adapter installed on her PC. I don't consider this feasible in this organization...

Also: the documents are pretty long (500+ pages) and the import function splits them up to give me one Confluence page for each level 1 chapter. If I used the the embed function I'd have to split the documents manually. That, too, looks like a bit of work that I would like to circumvent.

Robert E_ Schneider

OK, so I am not that far off. I tried this and it did not work well for me. But I might have done it wrongly, searched and replaced the wrong things. So, I will give it another try. Lest someone else comes up with something smarter ;-)

Robert E_ Schneider

As a matter of fact we're on a cloud installation. So the confluence-source-editor is not available to us.
The one that I tried was the Source Editor for Confluence, which is not free. But I guess, I'll just try it again. Search & replace should work in any editor, shouldn't it?

Bill Bailey

Well you have to perform this task on the source for the page (XHTML) and not in the normal view. And the free source editor supports RegEx which is really helpful as you will get tags with additional classes, IDs, style, etc. (even for ). A lot easier to search for <br.+?> then all the combinations. ;-)

As far as the commercial plugin, it is cheap when you think of the hours to process really long Word docs.

Another suggestion is to set up a small server version of Confluence ($10 license, could be local to your machine). Then you have access to all the tools. You can import the doc into a space, then export and reimport to your Cloud instance.

And be sure to do a cleanup pass on the Word doc. I typically do the following:

Remove any title page and ToC
Remove any headers and footers
Check that all the headings are really headings (formatted with H1, H2, etc.)
Check the heading hierarchy (really important when splitting a doc)
Delete any blank headings (you can see them easily in left-hand panel in Word).
If tracked changes are on, accept all edits and turn off (deleted text will get imported along with comments)
Delete all comments (see above)

Spending a few hours on cleaning up a Word doc before importing pays YOOGE dividends.

Or you have to pay a professional to do it for you. ;-)

Robert E_ Schneider

Good morning Bill,
it's me again...

Your advice works very well, but I'd like to come back to two extra questions:

1. I find that sometimes the import trims a blank after a bold word. Loks like this:

 Orientation<noblankhere>This parameter defines the appearance...

 of course it should look like this:

 Orientation This parameter defines the appearance...

In the source editor it looks like this:

OrientationThis parameter defines....

Of course I could replace "" with " ". But there are lots of s that already have a space after them and this would double the spaces.

So my question: as I have no experience with RegExs: can use a Find/Replace RegEx to only replace those - tags that have any character (except dot, comma, semicolon) directly behind them?

2. Do you know, whether the Source Editor has a "macro" feature that would allow me to automatize the Find/Replace operations?

3. I use Notepad++ a lot. That editor also has the capability for RegEx Find/Replaces - and I believe that it can do macros. Would it be an idea to go like this:
   a) open the document in the Cloud in the commercial editor (which obviously cannot do RegEx)
   b) copy all content into a Notepad++ file
   c) do the S/R there
   d) copy the content back to the commercial editor, wiping out the former content
Could that work?

Thanks for your patience with me!!

Robert

Robert E_ Schneider

Hi Bill,
please disregard my last message.

I found that the macros in Notepad++ can help me here a lot.

Now I got my boss to buy the commercial editor's licence. So I can

Open a page in the Source Editor (Cloud)
cut/paste the content into a NP++ file
run a macro that takes care of all my pains
copy/paste the content back

That's as swiftly as I can get it :-)

As for my - Problem: I tried finding "\w" and replacing it with " \w" but that didn't work. The RegEx seems not to "store" the character it found with the "\w" tag.
So I edited my NP++ - macro (inside shortcuts.xml) and added a search/replace sequence for each character and number. That's not very elegant, but it does the trick.
But, if you have a suggestion how I could achieve this in a RegEx, I'd be very happy. As I said, I have little to no experience with RegExs

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