= Improve Interpretation of Word Character Styles =

== Summary ==

WWeP 2010.2 incorrectly reports Word character styles as overrides. It inserts redundant span/@style attributes in the HTML, inflating the size of the output. This behavior should be fixed.

== Detailed Description ==

I have noticed that WWeP frequently misinterprets Word character styles as style overrides. The result is that WWeP inserts redundant CSS style attributes in the <span> tags. In documents that contain many character styles, this behavior can greatly inflate the output size.

I found a workaround, but is there a way to fix the problem permanently?

== Use Cases ==

In a large CHM project, the Word 2003 source documents contain approximately 15,000 instances of a character style call "autolink char". In Word, the style is defined as "default paragraph font + italic". I used the Word Formatting in Use tool to verify that the documents contain pure style formatting. They do not contain even a single instance of direct character or paragraph formatting.

In WWeP, I observed the following behavior:

1. The Styles Report lists every instance of the character style as an override.

2. In the *.wif files, each TextRun element that refers to a character style contains a Style element:

   <TextRun id="7000009" stylename="autolink char">
    <Style>
     <Attribute name="font-family" value="Times New Roman" />
     <Attribute name="font-size" value="10pt" />
     <Attribute name="font-weight" value="normal" />
     <Attribute name="font-style" value="italic" />
     <Attribute name="font-variant" value="normal" />
     <Attribute name="text-transform" value="none" />
     <Attribute name="text-decoration-underline" value="none" />
     <Attribute name="text-decoration-line-through" value="none" />
     <Attribute name="vertical-align" value="baseline" />
    </Style>
    <Text value="Some Text" />
   </TextRun>
 
3. In the generated CSS file, the style is formatted as follows:

span.autolink_char
{
  font-style: italic;
  font-variant: normal;
  font-weight: normal;
  text-transform: none;
  vertical-align: baseline;
}


4. In the generated HTML code, every one of the 15,000 instances is surrounded by <span> tags, like this:

<span class="autolink_char" style="font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline">Some Text</span>

The span/@style attribute appears to be completely redundant. It contains a subset of the style definition that exists in the CSS file.


WORKAROUND

I can get rid of the span/@style attribute by setting the offending CSS properties to Do Not Emit. When I applied this solution to the "autolink char" style, the CHM output size was reduced by 24%.

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