WHY IS MY BOOK PAGE TEXT CHANGING WHEN THE BOOK IS EXPORTED AND IMPORTED INTO ANOTHER WORK AREA?

[BarbV]

Hi,

I have an Enable Now work area where my team creates our learning objects (i. e., books, book pages, simulations, etc.), but we have to publish from a different work area. We are finding that if the font or size of a font is changed on a book page, when the book/book page is imported to the other work area, it is being overwritten by text style defaults set in the other work area. Does this mean that unless a specific text style is created for every size, color, font, that anytime someone makes a manual change to the formatting on a book page it is going to be randomly overwritten? That seems to be what is happening now, and it seems ridiculous that changing the size of the font on a page should be overwritten. Is there a setting that can be turned on/off to avoid having the text style defaults automatically overwrite formatting changes? Any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

[ShaneLipke · Accepted solution]

Hi Barb,

When you apply manual formatting to text in Enable Now that manual formatting is typically retained no matter whether you move the content between Workspaces or generate the content as documentation.  I just tested this in my Cloud demo environment and found that the formatting is definitely copied across into the new Workspace.  In the image below, you can see the manual formatting still applied to text in the new Workspace.

In one of the Book Pages that you think has an issue, open the Book Page in Producer in the new Workspace.  Then click on a text box to start editing that text and click the Source button on the bottom, left corner of the editing dialog box.  The manual formatting codes should still be applied to your text.  If they are not, please raise a support ticket using Component ID KM-SEN-PRO and get support involved.

Regards
Shane

[BarbV · Accepted solution]

Thank you! I compared the source code, and it is the same in both work areas. Despite this, SEN is randomly changing the fonts, spacing, etc. to match the text style default in the destination location. I have given the details to my administrator to open a support ticket. Thank you again!

[BartRhoten · Accepted solution]

And let's also state some Best Practices, such as: (a.) never use manual formatting if you can help it, (b.) always set up the appropriate text styles that you need and then select them from the Paragraph Style drop-down list in the HTML Editor as you enter text, (c.) remember to set up equivalent Text Styles for your printed documents, named the same so that they will map correctly during document generation, (d.) try to keep your Text Styles consistent from one workarea to the next, and (e.) you do not need a Development workarea versus a Production workarea, and do not let IT/BASIS or a corporate policy wonk bully you into doing that just because "that's how we manage our ERP environments." Simply have one workarea where you do all your development and publishing, and keep all your draft stuff Unpublished in a folder within that workarea tree. When you're ready to Publish it, move it into a Published portion of the workarea tree. You can control what is Published and what is Unpublished by using the SEN Manager interface, selecting the appropriate folder in the tree, and choose More > Publish All Objects or More > Unpublish All Objects. You can do this from Producer using the Server Bulk Actions > Change Workflow for All Objects menu, but that takes a lot longer if you have many objects.