The first step in the eXtyles process is document preparation. This section provides information on reviewing your document for unusual formatting, automatically checking the fonts used in your document, providing document metadata, and automatically normalizing your content.

Reviewing Your Document

When you first open a document in Word—before you start working with eXtyles—check the following items by giving the document a quick visual review for anything that might cause problems during eXtyles processing.

Visual Format

Look to see if the document has any formatting that is particularly unusual (e.g., especially large or small fonts, odd typefaces, garbage characters). Such formatting problems may indicate a document that was poorly imported from another word processing program or that will cause other problems as you work with it. If you encounter a document like this, determine which word processor the author used.

To facilitate the visual check of a manuscript, we recommend setting Field Shading in Microsoft Word to Always. This setting will cause all embedded fields (such as citations and references set up with a reference-management tool such as EndNote) to appear with a gray shade. Often this gray shading will aid in identifying potential problems in Word documents.

To enable field shading, select the File tab in Word and navigate to Word Options > Advanced > Show document content > Field shading and change from When Selected to Always.

Tables

Authors have been known to use a variety of creative methods to construct tables in Microsoft Word. eXtyles is optimized for tables that have been built using the Word table editor.

If tables are not converted to the Word table editor prior to eXtyles activation, you may lose the layout of the table, or some eXtyles functions may not work correctly.

Before activating a document with eXtyles, you should convert all tables built in other ways (e.g., tab-delimited, Excel table, etc.) into Microsoft Word tables. For more information about identifying and converting tables, please see “A Table is a Table is a Table,” available at http://www.inera.com/support/additional_guides.

Graphics

Graphics embedded in Word files may be left in place during eXtyles processing. However, Inera generally recommends removing graphics during eXtyles processing for best performance. Embedded images increase the file size of your document and can cause eXtyles to perform much more slowly. If you prefer to leave graphics in place, it is recommended that you insert linked images instead.

Some workflows may require linked images to be converted to embedded images after eXtyles processing. To easily convert linked to embedded:

1. In Word 2010 and later, click the File tab, and then select Info.
2. Click Edit Links to Files, located under the Related Documents heading. Note that this option only appears if there is a linked file in your document.
3. Select the linked files that you want to embed in your document.
4. Check the box for Save picture in document.
5. Click the Break Link button. A dialog opens; click Yes to confirm this action. The links are removed and the graphics are now embedded in your document.