Above is what my substitution keys look like. Below is what I am seeing in the PM designer for each key. Some of the keys do appear normally. Below is for the key poss. I have keys which are not underlined that are producing the same behavior. This word document was provided to me by the client. It is a paper form that customers would fill out by hand.
p</w:t></w:r><w:r w:rsidR="00134D25"><w:rPr><w:rFonts w:ascii="Arial" w:hAnsi="Arial" w:cs="Arial"/> <w:color w:val="000000" w:themeColor="text1"/><w:sz w:val="18"/><w:u w:val="single" w:color="221E1F"/> </w:rPr><w:t>oss</w:t></w:r><w:r w:rsidR="00052BF8"><w:rPr><w:rFonts w:ascii="Arial" w:hAnsi="Arial" w:cs="Arial"/> <w:color w:val="000000" w:themeColor="text1"/><w:sz w:val="18"/><w:u w:val="single" w:color="221E1F"/></w:rPr><w:t>
Any idea what the issue is? Can anyone reproduce this? I could send a portion of the document to anyone interested.
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There is a longstanding bug (since at least 10 years ago) in the Word Docx from Template smart service where Appian will "see" the replacement key name from the Word Template but will not filter out any background WordML markup language that has inadvertently been included "inside" the key name. The worst offender for causing this is having Spell Check enabled in Word while making any additions / changes to a template, as each key is apparently bound to become cluttered with markup after such changes.
This becomes important when making updates to a template because even if the plaintext key name is unchanged, any change to the random junk WordML "inside" the key (which you can only see in "View Documentation" for the process model, iirc, and if you open the "word/document.xml" xml file from within the document's zip file), cause the new template version's existing replacement key(s) to NO LONGER MATCH, and will actually clear themsevles out when refreshed.
Thank you so much for the detailed explanation! I got fed up with this issue and decided to use "PDF Doc From Template" instead. This worked fine except that the form fields were still editable in the output document. I started using the PDF Tools "Fill PDF" SS to solve this issue. I then realized I could also fill out the form with "Fill PDF". Currently tidying that up. The trickiest part was trying to find a free service for creating PDFs with form fields. I'm now on day 2 of my Adobe Pro free trial ;)
I love "Fill PDF", because if you have a big form with lots of complex substitutions, it's MUCH easier to handle it all in one expression rule than having to edit LOADS of INDIVIDUAL substitution expression boxes (UGH). Plus it flattens the output (or at least has the option to).