360Works Scribe placeholders not recognized / Tab converted to backspaces

[Ricky Romanini]

Hello everybody,

I'm just evaluating this great plugin on Mac to populate Word 2008 documents (contracts and letters) but I can't seem to create the required placeholder /tag fields within Word... in other words they are not correctly recognized by the plugin.

The manual is lacking support on this so I tried creating them using the Bookmark function and the Mail Merge function too but the ScribeDocListFields function keep showing "Error".

Is there something I'm missing or is the plug maybe designed to work with docs created with Word 2007 on Windows only?

I've been able to accomplish pretty much what I wanted to using the other function "ScribeDocSubstitute" but found another problem which relates to how tabs are processed. They seem to get automatically converted to backspaces by the plug.

Question to 360Works: Is there any plan to fix this and allow tabs to be passed into word normally (as tabs)?

Any help would be appreciated.

Best,

Ricky

[Spiro]

Have you solves this problem? I am having the same issue - amazing that 360works have not documented this fundamental step.

[Smef]

Could you further explain what you are trying to do with tabs, or post a document you are having trouble performing a find-and-replace on? Tabs being deleted or replaces with backspaces (deleting characters before the tabs?) in a find and replace is something I haven not seen before, but would like to help you resolve.

Placeholders for the find and replace function can be any text block you want. In our scribe example we use %%%CLIENTNAME%%% as an example of placeholder text to be replaced, but you could use any text you like. There is no special formatting or entry that needs to be done. You could do a find and replace for the word "the" if you wanted to. The placeholder you use is whatever you have entered that you want to replace.

The list fields function will list the tag name of Content Control fields in your Word document. These content control fields are only able to be created in Word 2007 on Windows, and not on Mac unfortunately. We have updated our documentation to include this information and it should be included in the next build of the plugin.

Please let me know if you need further clarification about these fields.

Edited September 7, 2010 by Guest

[Daniel Beer]

I'm having the same issue actually.

Trying to replace ~~tableline~~ with tab-separated columns:

one two three four five six seven eight

(just words and tabs (no spaces)).

I set a local variable first (to use as the replace, rather than the demo field itself) then updated the script.

The variable is correct - when you inspect it you can see the tabs are intact.

However when it writes the string to the word docx, all the tabs appear to be converted to spaces.

Thanks.

[Daniel Beer]

just for some more detail on this issue...

Here is the content of the resulting docx file (I have provided as an attachment also):

Starting text

one two three four five six seven eight

one two three four five six seven eight

ending text

The two outer lines are just for context.

The second line is what Scribe inserts (with spaces) and the third line (with tabs) is a manual paste of the contents of the replace variable (what scribe uses for its source).

Using data inspector, I copied this just before the script step that scribe uses to update the file.

Hope this helps

tabletest.docx.zip

[shmert]

Scribe does actually place the tabs in the word document, which word then converts to spaces when opening the file. A solution to this would be to mimic the way word adds tabs to the document, with XML data structures representing the contents of each tab.

I'll add this as a feature request. Thanks for reporting it!

[Daniel Beer]

Scribe does actually place the tabs in the word document, which word then converts to spaces when opening the file. A solution to this would be to mimic the way word adds tabs to the document, with XML data structures representing the contents of each tab.

Thanks - is this something I can do as it stands, or something that needs to be added to the plugin to make it work?