Word Tips
Maintaining a Template (.dot)
Creating template is not very complicated however, maintaining and updating without corrupting is quite challenging. Since, most of the things are done under the hood in Word there is no possible way to fix corrupted Word documents. Some advice to save corrupted file *.rtf extension and back to *.doc file. This will fix small things and will never solve if your bulleted lists are corrupted.
For every new Word release there's a new RTF release: 1.6 for Word 2000, 1.7 for Word XP, 1.8 for Word 2003 and you can even download 1.9 for Word 2007 from MSDN. Only RTF 1.6 and higher are Unicode-enabled. So, since the RTF in a way "mimicks" the corresponding Word format there's little help and saving files back and forth. Sometimes "Save as Word 6.0&95 RTF *.doc" cleans some corruption. In Word XP and 2003 there's a very helpful "Open" option which is easy to overlook: If you choose "File > Open", select the word file with problems and change the dropdown from "Open" to "Open and Repair", Word tries to repair structure problems of that file and most times it will find wrongly applied list styles and ask you whether you'd like to re-apply them etc.
Why corruptions occur?
When the template is couple years old and it is created in Word 2000. Now you are using Word 2003 and starting a new project. First thing Word is going to ask you once you try to open this Template in 2003 is going to be “this document is created in an older version of Microsoft Word please hit ok to update this document” once you select 'OK' there is no telling what is going to be corrupted in your template.
If you have Word 2003 or higher you can save both the old and the new template as XML files and compare them with your favorite text editor, with Windiff, with Araxis Merge or what you have. Since it is plain text you should be able to find the changes. Within the XML file you'll also be able to eliminate those "Char" styles that result from applying a paragraph style not to a paragraph but to a range of characters. These character styles are linked to their parent paragraph styles and if you just delete them you will delete the linked paragraph styles, too.
I would recommend all ePublisher Pro users to create they’re template from the scratch once they updated to a newer version of Microsoft Word.