How Rules are Processed and Why their Order in a Profile is Important

The Importer processes the rules in the sequence they appear in the profile, so the order that is specified in the profile is very important. How the rules are processed differs slightly for each type of document being imported, but they are processed in the following order:

1. Topic Creation Rules

   When processing Topic Creation rules, the Importer goes through the entire document one paragraph at a time checking to see if any of the rules apply. The first rule that satisfies the criteria is used. This means if you have two or more rules that could be true for a given paragraph, only the first one will be used.

2. Find and Replace Rules

   These rules can find any combination of text and formatting, and replace it with text (or no text) and Author-it character or paragraph styles. The Importer processes these rules in the order specified which then affects what the following rules can find. These rules can also affect what the formatting rules can find.

3. Style Mapping

   These rules fall into two categories, those that specify only character formatting or styles, and those that specify paragraph and character formatting or styles.

   Character rules are processed first, as applying the paragraph formatting would affect the character formatting. The Importer searches the document for the specified formatting (in the order specified) and applies an Author-it character style. So if for example you had one rule that found "bold" text, and another that found "bold and italic" text, the "bold and italic" rule would need to be run first. Otherwise the "bold" rule would find both the "bold" text and the "bold+italic" text, because they both contain bold formatting (and the "bold+italic" rule would then not find anything).