Tab two · Reading files

How Infovative reads your files

Before anyone trusts a handbook, they want to know where its words come from. The short answer: from the documents your team already keeps, read where they sit, and arranged by the headings your authors already used. This page explains which files it can read, how pages and sections are formed, and what stays put.

Formats it turns into pages

Word-processing documents saved as .docx or .odt, including their heading levels, lists and simple tables.
PDF files that carry selectable text, which covers most documents exported from an editor rather than scanned on a copier.
Markdown and plain-text files, where a line starting with a hash, or a line underlined with dashes, counts as a heading.
Simple saved web pages in HTML, read for their headings and paragraphs only.

Formats it lists but does not read

Scanned PDFs and photographs of paper, because there is no text in them to index. They appear in the folder report so an owner can replace them.
Spreadsheets and slide decks. Their meaning sits in layout and cells, and flattening them into paragraphs produces pages nobody can follow.
Password-protected or encrypted files, which it has no way to open and should not try to.

A long corridor of wooden shelves packed with bound volumes in a university library — Shelves of bound volumes: the old answer to the same problem of finding the right page.

Fig. 1 — a schematic, not a screen. Each file becomes one page; each heading inside it becomes a section.

Tab two · Sections

How sections are formed

Infovative does not guess at meaning. It follows the structure that is already in the file. A document becomes one handbook page. The page title is taken from the first top-level heading, or from the file name when there is no heading at all. Every heading below that opens a new section, and the section runs until the next heading of the same or a higher level.

This rule has a useful side effect. A procedure written as one long unbroken block of text becomes one long unbroken section, and that is easy to spot in the index. The folder report flags pages with no internal headings, so the person who owns the source can add a few and make the page easier to search. Nobody needs to restructure documents before the walk-through; the walk-through is where you see which ones would benefit.

Lists, numbered steps and simple tables keep their shape on the page. Images embedded in a document are shown where they sit if they are ordinary pictures, and skipped if they are decorative borders or page furniture. Footnotes are gathered at the end of their section. Headers, footers and page numbers from printed layouts are dropped, because a handbook page has no printed pages.

The index is ordered by folder first and title second, so the arrangement your team already understands survives. Editors can then move a page under a different heading in the index without touching the file itself.

Tab two · What stays where

Your files stay in your folders

Infovative connects to the folders you name with read-only permission. It does not move, rename or rewrite anything inside them. What it keeps on its side is the text it extracted for the search index, the page layout it built from that text, and the handbook settings your editors add on top: owners, review dates, related pages, change notes and access rules.

When a source file changes, the next read picks up the new version and the page updates. If a section was added, removed or reworded, a change note records which section moved, so readers can see that something is different without comparing two copies line by line. The wording of the note is plain and factual; editors can add a sentence explaining why.

When a file is deleted or moved out of a connected folder, its page is withdrawn from the handbook and marked in the index as gone, rather than silently left behind. Disconnecting a whole folder removes its pages and its entries from the search index.

Two things are worth saying plainly. First, Infovative only reads what you connect; it does not wander your drive looking for documents. Second, it shows your team what the files say, not whether they are right. If a policy needs checking by an HR or legal professional, that check happens outside the handbook, by people qualified to make it.

If you are unsure whether your own folders will read cleanly, that is exactly what the walk-through is for. We read one real folder together and you see every file it accepts and every one it leaves aside.