Re: [docbook-apps] Word 2007+ to DocBook

[Mathieu Malaterre <mathieu.malaterre@gmail.com>]

Greg,

  Here is my 2cts. I also used OO.org to convert from .doc (yes the
old binary format) to docbook. However even if I submited bug report +
patch:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=110762
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=110872
  there hasn't been any change in OO.org. I am not to sure about
docbook support in OO.org.

  I also used at some point Steve Ball rountrip stuff, but again none
of the bug I reported have been fixed:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?limit=25&func=&group_id=21935&atid=373747&assignee=&status=&category=&artgroup=&keyword=&submitter=malat&artifact_id=&assignee=&status=&category=&artgroup=&submitter=malat&keyword=roundtrip&artifact_id=&submit=Filter

  So I would not expect too much in those directions. I have heard
good things about majix. So I would suggest you maintain documentation
in docbook and only generates (one-way) RTF for WinWord people.

HTH

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 3:20 PM,  <gpevaco@aol.com> wrote:
> Steve:
>
> Thanks for the reply. I think I was a little unclear regarding the roundtrip
> aspect.
> I am not so interested in round trip, (but it would be nice to
> have) primarily I want to go one way into word.
> However the stylesheets I found happened to be in the 1.75.2/roundtrip
> directory.
>
> I do appreciate the info on the docx files. I had known that the Microsoft
> Word .docx format is essentially a zip file with a whole bunch of XML files
> in there, but was not aware that the main document content was in
> document.xml
> I have looked at that file, it is still really ugly straight out of word,
> but I am going to concentrate on refining that document down and see if that
> yields any better results. Investigation ongoing.
>
> Another option I had tried was to use openoffice.org writer as it has save
> as docbook.xml, seemed promising but I am not really impressed with the
> resulting XML.
> I tried a couple of approaches, one was to save the document in Word as
> .odt, then in OpenOffice Writer save as a docbook.xml...
> The other approach was to just open the word doc in openoffice, and let oo
> convert it and then save as docbook.
> That approach generated xml document that validated, but there are still
> some things (really ugly!) that I would like to see improvement.
> I wrote a few custom xslt to clean up some of it, and that is also ongoing
> work in progress.
> I would love to hear some other suggestions/options if anyone has already
> gone through all this!
> If you don't mind, when you do have a decent round trip scenario worked out,
> sharing it, just e-mail me directly, or post a link here. As I said
> initially I got lots of advice from old discussions here in the archives,
> who knows perhaps this can help someone else down the line.
> It would be very nice to have.
>
> Thank you very much for your kind reply!
> /Greg
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@explain.com.au>
> To: gpevaco@aol.com
> Cc: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
> Sent: Thu, May 6, 2010 6:49 pm
> Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Word 2007+ to DocBook
>
> Hi,
> The stylesheet structure was rationalised for the 1.75.2 release so that
> Word, Pages and OpenOffice formats could all be supported. There is a
> stylesheet for each of those formats that normalises the document to a
> common format, and then the other stylesheets take the document through to
> structured DocBook.
> Office 2007 basically uses WordML under-the-hood, and a .docx "file" is
> really just a Zip file containing the XML documents. The one with the
> document content is word/document.xml. It wouldn't be too much work to
> upgrade the roundtrip stylesheets to handle this document; basically it is
> just the XML Namespace URIs that have changed.
> I'm working on libxslt at the moment (implementing XSLT 2.0), so haven't
> really got time to look at the roundtripping stuff. However, email me
> directly if you have any further questions.
> Cheers,
> Steve Ball
> On 07/05/2010, at 6:29 AM, gpevaco@aol.com wrote:
>
> Howdy DocBook Community:
>
> I am new to DocBook, and also new to this forum. I have been going through
> the archives, and found some very interesting discussions. Primarily I am
> interested in moving/converting some documents from Word which they were
> authored in to DocBook.
> I have been looking at several tools to help in this process, and found some
> very good information here in the archives.
> One method which seems very promising is the docbook-xsl/roundtrip
> The discussion for this was from a few years ago. So I am thinking that
> the some of the style sheets may have changed with the docbook-xsl-1.75.2
> distro that I have. The suggested conversions were:
>
>  wordml-normalise.xsl, wordml-sections.xsl, wordml-blocks.xsl,
> wordml-final.xsl
>
> none of which I found in the 1.75.2
> Instead I have xsl such as:
> normalise-common.xsl, normalise2sections.xsl, sections2blocks.xsl, and
> blocks2dbk.xsl
>
> It seems to me that this is just the logical evolution of the same xsl style
> sheets referenced in the archives from years ago. Does anyone know if this
> is indeed the case.
>
> Further there has been little to no discussion or even apparently any new
> tools regarding converting Microsoft Word to DocBook at least for quite a
> while.
> Corresponding roughly to the time when Microsoft Word started
> implementing XML or w:xml as I like to call it. It is still very ugly xml,
> and even though the new docx format is apparently valid XML it is
> still cumbersome to work with, at least in my opinion.
> Are there any newer tools designed primarily to work with the latest
> incarnation of w:xml or any techniques that could help the effort to get
> these docs into DocBook?
> I greatly appreciate any response!
>
> Thanks,
> /GregP
>
> =



-- 
Mathieu