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The appearance of your generated files depends largely on how you mapped your Word and Publisher styles. By default, each Publisher project template includes a combination of paragraph, character, table, page, graphic, and field styles. The number of styles depends on the output format. To give you some examples, the standard Palm Reader and dynamic HTML projects include six and fifty paragraph styles respectively.

If you are not entirely satisfied with the results of mapping your Word styles to Publisher's standard styles, you might choose to increase your mapping options by adding new styles to your Word document, to the Publisher project, or to both. Rather than alter a standard project template, it is usually safer to make and modify a copy. Creating a new Publisher style can be—and I emphasise the word can—as easy as creating new Word style.

The following picture shows Publisher's Style Designer. Note that for each tab at the top of this dialog box, there is a row of sub-tabs (one to five depending on the style type) at the bottom. This gives you some idea of just how precisely you can define a style.

As I hinted earlier, designing styles can sometimes be rather more complex than this picture of the Style Designer suggests. The clue is the Macro sub-tab. If you wish or need, you can define how Publisher uses a style by writing some code with Publisher's macro language. Although this is meant to be a relatively simple language, you can include regular expressions in your code if you are a confident programmer.

Modifying supporting files

You can also change the appearance of your generated files by editing some of your project's supporting files. For example, you can edit the page template file, Normal.asp for project types, to modify every page in the final online format. If you are comfortable editing HTML, you can easily change this file to control what your online publication uses for:

By editing another file, locales.xml, you can change the text labels used on certain navigation controls. In the same file, you can also change the set of stop words that controls the Search function in some help formats. As its name suggests, locales.xml is particularly useful if you need to translate a document to different languages. If you want to generate WebWorks Help for a non-English language, you will also need to edit messages.xml.

Compared to the sophisticated interface of other parts of Publisher, this need to edit supporting text files with an external text editor is surprising basic.

Using media types and WebWorks fields

The customisations I've mentioned so far all affect the processing of entire Word documents. Sometimes you might want control over just a paragraph, a picture, or other very specific item of information. In many cases, you can achieve this level of control by using the WebWorks menu that Publisher added to Word's menu bar during installation. The following picture shows you all the new options that this menu gives you. In particular, notice the items that refer to media types and WebWorks fields.

Media types are the Publisher equivalent of what other authoring tools call conditional text. Using media types, you designate certain parts of the content as only suitable for one media or one class of media. The following picture shows the appearance of two sections of a Word document that I have assigned to different media type.

As this example illustrates, you can assign a colour to a media type to help you identify media-specific information while editing.

Although similar to Word fields in appearance, WebWorks fields are easy to distinguish in a document; they all begin with PRIVATE WWF. WebWorks fields serve a variety of purposes as I'll demonstrate with a few examples.

Some fields allow you to provide interactivity to an online publication without adding code to a Word document. In a web page or help topic, you might want to make some sections of text expandable so that information is shown or hidden when a user clicks on a link. To mark the end of an expandable section, you insert a DropDownEnd field.

The way that Publisher treats graphics is rather complex because so many variable factors have an influence. For example, Publisher does not preserve any percentage scaling that you apply to a picture linked to a document. (On the other hand, scaling is preserved if you add a picture by some other methods.) However, you can force Publish to apply a scaling percentage if you insert GraphicScale field immediately in front of a linked graphic.

Some WebWorks fields help you to overcome the differences between Word 2000 and Word XP. In Word XP you can assign styles to tables. Consequently, you can map a Word table style to a Publisher table style before you generate your online formats. Word 2000 does not let you assign a style to a table. However, you can overcome this problem by inserting a TableStyle field in any cell of a Word 2000 table. During generation, Publisher then treats the table as though it has a Word XP table style.

The need for a methodology

Publisher offers you such a multitude of ways to manipulate and refine online publications that it invites experimentation and endless tweaking. I enjoyed my experiments, but they soon became very time-consuming. It is clear that you would not want to embark on a significant project without having decided on a clear methodology to guide you. Your methodology will need to vary from document to document.

If you are converting consistent, well-structured documents created by experienced authors, you will probably concentrate your efforts on creating effective Publisher styles. However, if you have to work with legacy documents that had been revised by numerous and diverse contributors, you might need to spend a greater proportion of your time improving the Word documents and inserting WebWorks fields to overcome specific problems.

Summary | Starting a project | Customisation and tweaking (top) | Other points

WebWorks Publisher 2003 for Word

Using styles

Modifying supporting files

Using media types and WebWorks fields

The need for a methodology