eXtyles Cleanup can occasionally seem to hang or freeze when, in fact, it is still working but is taking an unusually long time to complete. This typically occurs when the document includes a large amount of character style markup. Removing unnecessary character styles while preserving the correct visual formatting is a more time-consuming process than the other Cleanup tasks. During Cleanup, animated feedback appears in the lower left corner of the Word window. When Cleanup is taking a long time, look for this feedback (e.g., “Converting style ‘Strong’ to face markup”), which will confirm that eXtyles is still processing the file and hasn’t crashed.

If eXtyles appears to genuinely freeze during Cleanup on a given document, you can turn off some of the Cleanup processes to determine which one fails and then run all except the task that fails. Note that the most likely processes to fail are “Convert Auto-Numbered Headings and Lists to Plain Text” and “Convert Word Fields to Plain Text,” so the first step is to turn both of these off and see if the failure still occurs. If the problem goes away, you can then replicate the conversion of Word fields to plain text by choosing Select All (Ctrl-A) followed by Ctrl-Shift-F9. Converting lists to plain text actually need not be performed by eXtyles Cleanup; Inera has moved this step to document activataion for most customers because of problems Word has with correctly retaining list numbers when converting from DOC to RTF format.