HOWTO do a doc formatting reset (Word, GDocs, etc.)

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webfork
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HOWTO do a doc formatting reset (Word, GDocs, etc.)

#1 Post by webfork »

Background

Have you ever opened a document and it didn't look right? The fonts and line widths are wrong. Some numbering is right, some not. The headlines look wildly out of place.

There are parts of these documents that we want to lose ...


Screenshot of poorly imported timesheet doc and pointers to all document issues

But there are also things we want to keep ...


Screenshot of that same poorly imported timesheet doc, but with useful formatting bits

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You are the cleanup crew

Invariably this result means messing with the available tools to make it readable. It's inconsistent, vague, and format controls are overcomplicated. Sadly, the recent (very welcome) compatibility efforts from LibreOffice will keep coming up up against efforts by Microsoft to make sure only the author program (MS Office) can open it correctly.

Or at least that used to be the issue: collaboration issues used to be solved when everyone had the latest version of Microsoft Word, but now even they have this problem internally. I've had ongoing issues between the installed Word and Word on the Cloud. You can't win.

So, after wrestling with formatting incompatibilities like these or frequently starting over via "paste as pure text" over and over again for years, I worked out a better system.

Reset Process

What follows is a very simple and most importantly predictable way to cut document formatting down to only it's essentials. There are several ways to do this but what follows is my a detailed breakdown on my current system.


Detailed steps
  1. Open your "rich text" formatted document in your editor of choice. This could be MS Word, Google Docs, but I prefer LibreOffice.
  2. Select all and copy
  3. Paste into a Markdown-based editor that supports Rich Text import (I use Zettlr)
  4. Right-Click and select "Copy as HTML" or press CTRL+ALT+C


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    Screenshot of Zettlr's right-click screen

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  5. Paste into your destination template file that you want to draw from. The text that appears should inherit the properties (indentation, line width, font, etc.) of the text around it.
It's not perfect and you may still have to make minor edits (as in our result below) but very few. I often see headlines get dropped and numbered / nested lists fail to show up correctly. Still, this is far and away the fastest way to cleanup document formatting issues.

Result:


Resulting text
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Overview

Image
Process flowchart (made in XMind)
Last edited by webfork on Sun Feb 06, 2022 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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