Limitations when Publishing to RTF
Be aware of the following limitations and usage notes when using Arbortext Import/Export to publish documents as RTF files:
• To preview published RTF documents from Arbortext Styler, a Windows application must be associated with the .rtf file extension. Typically, Word is associated with .rtf , but WordPad will also display .rtf documents.
• RTF does not support VBA macros. However, templates that contain macros can be actively associated with an RTF file. RTF does not support toolbars, because document-specific toolbars employ VBA. In the same way, RTF does not support autotext lists since these also employ VBA.
• User-defined style names cannot exceed 64 characters when manually entered on the Arbortext Editor RTF tab. Selecting style names from a user-defined drop down list allows for style names up to 253 characters long.
• Links can only contain text data.
• Hyphenation is supported at the paragraph level, but is not apparent unless the global hyphenation option is enabled in MS Word. Automatic hyphenation must be manually enabled in Word to view the hyphenation.
• Hyphenation does not address localization differences.
• Word character styles do not include a background color (or highlight) property. Therefore, an inline element which is mapped to a character style cannot simultaneously apply the background color. This limitation does not prevent you from formatting the background color of an inline element when that element is not mapped to an RTF character style.
• Arbortext Styler inline elements cannot be published as RTF paragraph styles in a reliable manner. If the Arbortext Styler structure type is Inline, and the desired output is an RTF paragraph style, create an Arbortext Styler UFE of structure type Block and associate the desired RTF paragraph style with that UFE. With Arbortext Styler generated text, you can publish the original element and its content within the context of the UFE.
• When auto-generating style names when publishing to RTF, Arbortext Import/Export assumes that certain Arbortext Styler style categories do not contain text data or have no style information at all. Therefore, because they do not correspond to a Word paragraph style or character style, Arbortext Import/Export will not create a Word style for the following Arbortext Styler styles or roles:
◦ Custom Table
◦ Definition List
◦ Division
◦ Document
◦ Formal Block
◦ Graphic
◦ Index
◦ Table Style
◦ Index
◦ Index Term (both models)
◦ List Bulleted
◦ List Numbered
◦ No Style
◦ Table of Contents
◦ Unstyled
◦ Table
◦ Table roles such as header row and row
• Arbortext Import/Export lets you import Word document standard Word stylesheet properties and user-defined document stylesheet properties. However, you can only publish user-defined document stylesheet properties with Arbortext Import/Export.
• If you plan to re-import documents you have published to RTF (that is, “round trip” the documents), be aware of the following limitations:
◦ Specific ID values will not persist during a round-tripping process. The values might change when publishing to RTF because the valid character set allowed in Word is a subset of the valid characters allowed in a typical ID attribute. If you choose to limit XML ID values to the bookmark subset, the round-tripping of ID values will be far more consistent and successful.
◦ A division/block/paragraph construct in XML can only exist in a paragraph in Word, since Word has no concept of a division. This is a many-to-one conversion, which cannot be round-tripped unless the target paragraph in Word has a unique style name which has only one structural meaning: in this case, division/block/paragraph.
◦ A DTD which represents a Word document might be as follows:
<!Element doc (Paragraph*, Table*, List*, Footnote*, Graphic*) >
In the same way as valuable information is lost when transforming from XML to HTML, valuable information and granularity can be lost when converting from XML to Word. A many-to-one transformation does not easily make the round trip without a unique style name to represent the starting XML context.
◦ No place exists in a Word document to store attribute values (metadata) which are important to XML, but have no visible place in the document text. You can place them in hidden text or in PRIVATE fields, but Word authors are highly likely to modify or delete them because they are often hidden.
◦ When publishing text with the underline or strikethrough effects applied, spaces between words also have the underline or strikethrough effect.