Word document with H1 formatting not importing chapters

I am trying to import a Word document with multiple chapters into Pressbooks. It is formatted with the H1 style for individual chapters.

Instead of importing the individual chapters I am getting _UNKNOWN as the title. In some cases I am getting blank titles which result in blank chapters.

Along with this issue content styled as bulleted lists are not imported with this format.

I have been importing files formatted in this way for a number of years but have never had this problem before.

How can I resolve this?

I remember vaguely that I faced the same issue when importing Word documents. I remember it was caused by the naming of the headings inside the docx. I think I came to that conclusion by unzipping the renamed docx. Furthermore, I cannot remember how I worked around the issue then, but I now had success by saving the docx file as an odt file (Open Document Text) first. Then the heading 1 titles created separate chapters in Pressbooks during import of the odt file. I hope this works for you.

As it worked for you before, was the Word document created or edited by a person using a German version of Office?

PS: I unzipped my docx and looked at the document.xml inside. The headings are formatted as “berschrift1” standing for the German “Überschrift1“ (Heading1).

Thank you for writing. I ended up copying and pasting into Pressbooks, since I couldn’t resolve it any other way.

Rena