Re: [docbook-apps] Tool for Word->DocBook conversion (UpCast?)

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>]

Patrick Eisenacher wrote:

> I expect that MS is going to use some proprietary XML schema. Since it's 

It can be compared to RTF expressed in XML. Nothing perfect, but at 
least it can XSLTed to some better format.

> XML, this would allow an XSL transformation to Docbook, I guess. But you 
> won't get a MS Word that reads/writes Docbook out of the box. Perhaps 
> someone will write a smart plugin to do so...

In Word 2003 you can mix "old style" editing pure visual mode with 
schema driven XML editing. If you will stick with XML schema driven mode 
you can get any sort of XML vocabulary for which you have schema from 
Word. But it needs that you are using Word as XML editor and you are 
selecting right elements from context sensitive list.

Word can also apply XSLT transformation on created XML before saving. It 
  looks promising at the first glance, but there are some problems which 
I hadn't solved yet. It seems that Word supports only schemas with 
defined target namespace. This probably could be solved by XSLT 
transformation on load/save which will add/remove namespaces from 
DocBook document (note that there is not namespace for DocBook). Second 
problems is, that Word is very poor on styling newly created XML 
content. Lets hope that MS will improve this before final version.

But even Word 2003 with XML support is far from effectivity of XML input 
present in tools like Epic or XMetaL.

				Jirka

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   Jirka Kosek  	
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