export formatted dictionary to Microsoft Word?

[Kevin_...@sil.org]

I’m trying to help someone who wants to export his formatted dictionary to Microsoft Word, but there is no such option on the Export format list. Does he need to use Pathway to do this? Or how does one pass formatted dictionary data from FLEx to Word? Or is this the wrong goal? Should he be trying to do something different?

 

Thank you,

Kevin Warfel

 

[H. Hirzel]

yes, I think pathWay is needed. In any case a good thing to install.
And then the export to use is probably ODT (LibreOffice).

--Hannes

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[Andreas_Joswig]

I have tried to do this a few weeks ago, and failed miserably. Of course, Pathway only exports to Open/Libre Office - I think as of now it has not been configured to export to Word. But this was not my problem - I like to work with LibreOffice, and would have used it gladly for the dictionary. It's just that the Pathway export still does not work. It continues to export unwanted information, and dropping wanted information, and it fails to format as it should. Part of the problem here is indeed Open/LibreOffice, which still don't have proper routines for handling guidewords. The macros created by Pathway still work only partly.
So, I still had to fall back on Lexique Pro, which has its own problems (such as that still lots of redundant information gets included - it does not seem to care when you told Flex what you want to see in minor entries or only in subentries, it still spawns the info in all possible places in the dictionatry). But Lexique Pro would export into a Word document, if this is important to you.
But I think that currently we are still at the frustrating point that we have no useful document export option for dictionaries out of Fieldworks that faithfully represents the configuration that you set up in Fieldworks. Whatever you do, you will be forced to spend many hours of tedious editing work after the exporting process, creating a lot of new mistakes while doing this. And even Word still has guideword problems, so that you need to check very carefully in each case that they show what you want.
Andreas

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[Robert Hedinger]

I have exported several dictionaries sucsessfully with Pathway to Libre Office. If you have problems contact greg_...@sil.org who is working on the Pathway module. I had many issues to deal with, but he and his team have always helped me out.

When Pathway works it does a great job.

Robert

[Kevin_...@sil.org]

Thank you to those of you who responded to my question. I had the great good fortune of finding Greg Trihus in person this week here where I'm working and he showed me how to install Pathway, Libre Office, etc., after which I successfully exported the dictionary to both LO and Word. Perhaps because the dictionary I am working with is not as complex as the one you have, Andreas, I encountered no problems like the ones you mentioned. Or maybe I used a more recent version of Pathway which is improved over what you had/have?

In any case, I learned a lot and was grateful to be able to do so.

Again, my heartfelt thanks to all who responded!

-Kevin

[Andreas_Joswig]

Well, I also tried again, and again ran into trouble, even with a new installation of Pathway. But some things sorted themselves out this time. It already happened the second time to me that initially the pathway configuration tool would not accept any changes I did to my own configuration file, but a reboot fixed this. When I then exported the dictionary, it came out horribly, because LO changed all instances of the Abyssica SIL Font into Charis, and the automatic font replacement then picked an awful Ethiopic font. Interestingly, when I changed the font-size, all came out perfectly with the next export. I have no explanation for this. Once I had these things overcome, things looked already better than my last export over Lexique pro, but there are still problems with the guidewords. I wish I could run into Greg sometime and have him look over my shoulder...
Andreas

On 24.07.2013 20:44, Kevin_...@sil.org wrote:

[GregT]

Well since I was in the same building with Kevin, I went and we walked through the process of exporting from Pathway to Word. We exported to ODT, opened the result in Libre office and then were able to open it in Word. We then had to add the headers using the Quick Parts, Fields, StyleRef. I have written to Andreas to try to get a detailed list of the issues he is having with the exports. 

[J V C]

Based on my own experiences from a year or two ago, you might try the following (assuming you own a copy of MS Word):
- Export to ODT via Pathway *without* guidewords. That way, they won't clutter up the document. (I've also found it safer to export my main dictionary and its two reversal indexes as three separate documents--i.e. three separate exports.)
- If there are specific kinds of find/replace you want to do in LO (e.g. using real regex), do them now.
- Save as DOC and do the rest of the work in MS Word, since it runs/repaginates faster, handles guidewords better, and has better find/replace for formatting-related things.

Just my two cents' worth,
Jon

On 7/25/2013 8:17 AM, GregT wrote:

Well since I was in the same building with Kevin, I went and we walked through the process of exporting from Pathway to Word. We exported to ODT, opened the result in Libre office and then were able to open it in Word. We then had to add the headers using the Quick Parts, Fields, StyleRef. I have written to Andreas to try to get a detailed list of the issues he is having with the exports. 

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