Embed Style Map

The online tool should add the style map as part of the ZIP file (since docx files are actually ZIP files), so shouldn’t affect the rest of the file. From my experience, you can continue to edit and save the file, and the style map is preserved, although that depends on exactly how Word, or your editor of choice, saves the file. Are you saying that you start with a document that converts normally using Mammoth (albeit with missing styles), you try embedding a style map, and then it no longer converts at all?

If you could provide some example documents, both before and after attempting to embed a style map, as well as the expected and actual HTML that you’re getting, that would help.

As for the style map: you’ll need to use a dot to generate classes in the HTML i.e.

r[style-name=’StandOut’] => span.StandOut

Ahhh, the style map is a file inside the docx. That explains that. And I was happy to learn that span.MyClass works.

>>>Are you saying that you start with a document that converts normally using Mammoth (albeit with missing styles), you try embedding a style map, and then it no longer converts at all?

Not exactly, The WP plugin never failed to convert. I was never able to try a wp post with a docx that had an embedded style map.

That’s because I could not get the conversion tool at https://mike.zwobble.org/projects/mammoth/embed-style-map/ to work, first on a docx of rather normal complexity, then on a simple docx with only one line of text and one style mapping. I thought document complexity might be a factor because I erroneously thought you were imbedding the style map inside document.xml.

So, back to the embed-style-map page. When I upload the docx, type in the style mappings, and press “embed” it takes me to a blank page with no downloads available.

I’m going to try again later. If it still doesn’t work for me, I will get you the docx that I couldn’t get to work with the embed-style-map page. It’s probably something I’m doing wrong.

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BTW, just for grins, I tried unzipping a docx, putting in a small whatever.txt file, and re-zipping it with a rename to *docx. MS Word 2016 Mac refused to open it, and tells me “There are problems with the content.”

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One another topic, I know from another post that you don’t have the time to enhance the plugin to let a user enter a style map in wp admin. Totally understandable. I’m going to present a simpler solution and ask if you would consider that.

Would you consider adding a couple of JS “hooks” to mammoth-editor.js? Of course these are not the PHP hooks of WordPress, but they would work similarly for javascript. If the applicable callback function happened to be defined and loaded before mammoth-editor.js, it would be called, otherwise things would work as before.

Something like this – not trying to be exact, but to present an idea:

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The first js “hook” would allow a wp theme or plugin developer to add to the default style map or replace it:

if (typeof mammoth-getExtraStyleMap == ‘function’) {
extraStyleMap = mammoth-getExtraStyleMap();
}

getExtraStyleMap return an object containing a style map array as sell as a value indicating if this should be added to the default map or replace it.

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The second would allow for modifying the preview html before it was echo’d to the user:

if (typeof mammoth-filterPreview == ‘function’) {
filtered-preview-html = mammoth-filterPreview(html);
}

The filtered-preview-html would then be used to display the preview to the user.

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If you decide you are willing to make these changes, I would be happy to write some good documentation for the plugin and the github page.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond. I believe your plugin has commercial value, and would be more than happy to pay for it to support development.

Thanks -Greg

Thanks for the suggestion about style maps — I’ll have to think about it and get back to you when I have a bit more spare time.

As for the embed: what browser are you using? Recent versions of Chrome and Firefox should work fine. I think recent versions of Internet Explorer should also work fine, although I’m not sure whether I’ve actually tested it myself recently.

Apologies for not having particularly good (or indeed, any) documentation around embedding style maps. It’s something that I’ve been meaning to get around to!

Taking another look at your suggestion: why would you want to modified the preview HTML?

There are a number of transforms I would want to make. For example, using imaging metadata. MS Word has some, however poor facility for adding metadata for images, like alt text, but it’s not parsed by Mammoth or Calibre.

So I’ve established a convention of placing a paragraph of style ‘ImageMeta’ after the image, and placing some meta in a one line paragraph of that style. The text line looks like this:

A Pretty Picture | Photo by John Doe | https://whatever.com/hello

where the metadata is alt text (and title), attribution, and link. I format this to look like a caption with very small text, but it’s not an MS Word caption for a number of reasons.

I could then manipulate the html to include the alt text, make it a link, and put the attribution in another attribute on the image tag. Since the file name is generated, it may be important for SEO to have the alt text be descriptive.

That’s just one of the transforms I want to make. I hope that gives you an idea. I could likely make these transforms in PHP when the “Save Draft” or “Publish” button was hit, by using a WP hook. But it would be nice to make them earlier in the process.

It’s not as important as having a programatic way to add a style map, because these things could be done later by a WP hook, whereas the style map couldn’t.

After thinking about the preview html question some more, a better way would be to add a couple special php WordPress style filter hooks to apply to the html.

One would be pre-preview to allow the html to get filtered before you display the preview.

The other would be after “Insert into Editor” gets pressed but before the html gets inserted into the editor.

I checked, and the content-edit-pre hook does not fire when that happens.

The transforms could then be done in PHP.

On the html filtering, I’m working on the code now. I’ll can send it to you, to see if you’re willing to merge it. It will be done in a way that might be useful to others, using hooks and such. If you decline, no problem, I understand.

If you want to send any code my way, the project is hosted on GitHub, so feel free to open a pull request. If you’re adding hooks, I would imagine they probably belong in the client-side JavaScript (which can then call back to the server if necessary).

https://github.com/mwilliamson/mammoth-wordpress-plugin

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I’m confused about how to use style maps too. Do I just write them in the word document itself? They seem easy enough to write, just not sure how to go about doing it. This sounds like a great plugin, I look forward to using it. Thanks ??

Hello! To embed style maps, you’ll need to use an online tool, as described on the main plugin page.