Help:Report generation

Manual preparation of source document

Before converting a Word document to other formats, we need to ensure that the layout is clean and semantically valid. If authors have used direct formatting instead of semantically defined styles (e.g., boldface type for headings), the document will not convert well into wikitext, HTML, epub, or PDF.

1. Go to File > Check for issues > Inspect document. Select everything then press the "Inspect" button. If there are any comments, tracked changes, document properties, etc., click "Remove All".
2. Ensure that headings follow a nested outline: Heading 2 (chapter), Heading 3 (subsection), Heading 4 (sub-subsection).
3. Remove extra line breaks (between paragraphs, before and after headings or tables, line breaks used instead of page breaks, etc.)
4. Move caption text for images into the alt text field for each image (Right click and "Edit alt text"). Ensure that each caption fully describes the image and includes attribution.
5. If pictures are inside of frames, cut and paste back into the document so they are no longer contained within a frame. A group of images with an individual caption should be split up, so that each image has an individual caption. (Complex layouts in Word will break when converted to other formats.)
6. Graphs and Smart Art need to be embedded as images, instead of as editable objects. Cut and paste back into the document, selecting "paste as image". Alternatively, if the option is available in your version of Word, graphs can be downloaded as SVG (scalable vector) images and pasted back into the document.
7. If the document contains Zotero citations: Navigate to Zotero > Document Preferences > Switch to a different word processor. This will convert all the citations into hyperlinks.

Upload to the wiki

1. Run the docx2wiki command. Indicate the target pagename on the wiki (i.e., the title of the document) and the path to the docx document. This will update the image database with hash values for any new (unrecognized) images, upload new images from the current document to the wiki, then upload the document text.
2. If successful, you will see the message "Page [[<pagename>]] saved".

Review and clean up the wiki page

1. Manually check the tables. Sometimes Word can store incorrect table layout data if columns, rows, or cells have been merged and re-split, or otherwise edited in non-standard ways. If this is an issue, copy and paste from the source document into the wiki visual editor.
2. Move table caption text into the table caption
3. Convert table headers to "Header Cell"
4. Insert the metadata template.
5. Check citations. If the citation data could not be retrieved from Zotero, edit the template.
6. Add a "Notes" header.
7. Convert footnotes using Cite > Basic.