Problem with pictures in KB articles

Filip_Theyssens

Hello all,

We are just starting to look at implementing the Knowledge Base.

Using the Article on converting Word to HTML, I converted and imported several articles in the knowledge base.

for some articles all pictures are correctly rendered.

Other pictures however were edited in paint to include some arrows etc to clearly show to the user where to click.

Does anybody have an idea what could be causing this?

Thanks!

Brett_Moffett

Unfortunately, MS Word does not put out very clean HTML and therefore messes with a lot of the formatting.
There is no way to mass upload files from Word to the KB articles without doing some clean up afterwards.

Brett_Moffett

I believe the cause of this is the pictures that were captured and injected directly in to Word are converted to BASE64 and therefore are "Code" rather than a link to another picture.
When you edit a picture or insert it like you are with the edited pictures, it is using a link to a picture elsewhere in the Word file that the KB article can not get access to.

Usually for KB articles I either covert the images to BASE64 or save the images to a CDN (Content location) then use image links to that location within the HTML.

BASE64 can make the file HUGE if the images are big or if there are lots of them. This can make the KB Article load slowly, so it's not a great solution.

Linked images load faster, but you will have to save them somewhere everyone has access to and manually insert them int he KB article after the import from Word.

Hope this helps.

Filip_Theyssens

Hi Brett,

The images are indeed embedded into the word document directly and get converted to Base64.
I was just wondering why this works for other documents and pictures but the ones that have been edited in paint don't load correctly..

Brett_Moffett

The wonderful word of Word formatting is dark magic and is only understood by the gods themselves!

Microsoft Word has never been great at generating clean HTML code when you save documents as HTML. Unfortunately there is no rhyme or reason to it. Sorry.

Filip_Theyssens

I'm afraid the customer won't go forward with implementing the knowledgebase if they have to rework all their current documents to go in and save each picture on a web-enabled fileshare to reference them later on in the KB Articles..

I was hoping that there would be a more plug and play method for importing word, but If I understood correctly the above mentioned procedure is the way to go?

Thanks

Brett_Moffett

Unfortunately, MS Word does not put out very clean HTML and therefore messes with a lot of the formatting.
There is no way to mass upload files from Word to the KB articles without doing some clean up afterwards.