Inconsistent indents with multiple input formats

A customer had a project that used input documents from both Word 2003 and FrameMaker 7.2. The documents had similar format catalogs, and he expected to have control over corresponding styles in both types of documents via the ePublisher Pro Style Designer.

After modifying the left margin for a particular paragraph style in the Style Designer and generating output, he was surprised to find that the output generated for the Word documents showed a different margin than that from the Frame docs.

The source of the problem was found to be in the way margins can be defined in Word and FrameMaker. In FM, you might set the left margin to 0pt and the indent to 0.5". The Word UI might make it more logical to set the left margin to 0.5" without changing the text indent. All other settings notwithstanding, the output from each type of document should be the same--all instances of the affected paragraph style will appear with a .5" (or 36pt) space from the left margin.

However, if you make a change to one of those setting in the Style Designer ()say you set the left margin for this style to 54pt), then you'll get different output from Word and FM source. In this example, the Word source will result in the desired 54pt left margin in the output, while the Frame source will generate a 54pt left margin plus the original 36pt text indent.

To prevent this situation, ensure that styles shared across multiple input sources are configured with equivalent attributes. To correct the problem after the fact, you can either modify the styles in one of the Source templates or set both text-indent and left margin properties in the ePublisher Style Designer.