Losing Word italics when exporting FrameMaker 11 file

Question

When I import a Word file into Frame - the italics and bold characters are maintained. But if I save the file as HTML or XML - they disappear. If I retag them with the character tags they are maintained, but working in a science document the italics are everywhere. Is it possible to search for the original italics and replace with character tag?
I am using FrameMaker 11.

Answer 1

Another possible approach is, once you've opened the Word document in FrameMaker, to use the File > Utilities > Create and Apply Formats command. This command creates new formats (in particular, paragraph and character formats) as necessary, storing them in the associated catalog and applying them to objects in the current document, so that there are no format overrides. For example, suppose your Word document has 24pt bold red text within titles, 12 point bold text within regular paragraphs, and 10 point bold text within list items, Create and Apply Formats might create new formats called CHARFMT1, CHARFMT2, and CHARFMT3 for these three cases. You can then use these tags in Find/Change to make a global change to a more meaningful format name or in a conversion table, to map content with the specified tags to the appropriate element types.
Be warned, though, that often Create and Apply Formats can produce a large number of formats from one Word tag. For example, there may be numerous variations in the formatting of paragraphs tagged Normal. Create and Apply Formats retains the name Normal for the first one, and appends sequence numbers to the others. You may find yourself with paragraph formats tagged Normal1, Normal2, and so forth with the sequence number going to 20 or more.
Furthermore, since it is unlikely that all variations of a format used in one document appear and appear in the same order in a different document, it is likely that different sequence numbers and hence different tags will be used for a particular variation in two different documents.
Nevertheless, in many projects this command can be extremely useful.
          --Lynne