Re: Roundtripping DocBook to/from Word

[Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@explain.com.au>]

Hi Jens,

You wrote:
> I have been looking forward to try-out you DocBook/WML, but just
> discovered you do not support Chapter/Appendix although you do  
> support the
> Book element. I will have to see if I can write these templates.
>
> N.B. According to http://www.explain.com.au/oss/docbook/ 
> supported.html,
> both chapter and appendix are supported

I'll check that out.  These should both be supported as both toplevel  
and component elements.

BTW, I'd like to use the SourceForge bug/RFE tracking system for  
these issues.  I'll look into what is needed to set that up.

> By default you param.xsl set the wordml.template to
>
>   <xsl:param name="wordml.template" select=""/>
>
> If you want to define the empty string, you should properly use
>
>   <xsl:param name="wordml.template" select="''"/>
>
> instead, otherwise e.g. Saxon dies.

I can't see that problem.  It is defined that way in params/ 
wordml.template.xml,
and my copy of param.xsl has:

<xsl:param name='wordml.template'/>
<xsl:param name='pages.template'/>

That should be OK.

> It was not immediately obvious, what value to use here, but it must  
> be the
> following value, I should use
>
>   <xsl:param name="wordml.template" select="'template.xml'"/>

I've tried to make that clear in the documentation on the Explain  
website.

> Some of my documents contains XML processing instruction, which I  
> would
> like to keep even if I transform them from DocBook to Word and back  
> again.
> Is the a Word ML (cover it all element), just like the \special  
> macro in TeX

No, there are no special WordML elements.  You must use some feature  
of Word to encode the information, and then translate it back again.   
I'd suggest defining a paragraph style, say "xmlpi", and character  
styles, say "xmlpi-target" and "xmlpi-data", and using those to  
encode the values.

This brings up the issue of customisation, which I haven't really  
addressed yet.  You want to be able to interpose your own custom  
handling of elements and styles on top of the processing provided by  
the round-tripping system.  I'll have a think about this over the  
next couple of weeks.

> Most documents contains graphics in one form or another. Word will  
> not for
> a forseable future (if ever) support my SVG figures, but I will  
> properly
> have to enclose a kind of BASE64 raster versions of my images. Will  
> that
> be possible with an implementation of a imagedata template, and  
> will I be
> able to "reverse" my BASE64 spec/or reference to a raster image  
> back to a
> reference to my svg file ?

Graphics are currently supported by linking to the external image  
file.  See imageobject-imagedata.

> Should the files specification.xml and supported.xml located in  
> wordml/
> not be moved to docsrc/ and included in the document generation  
> process ?

Possibly, I'll raise the issue with the other DocBook developers.

HTHs,
Steve Ball