Re: [docbook-apps] XSLT based DocBook to RTF conversion?

["Michael(tm) Smith" <smith@sideshowbarker.net>]

Doug du Boulay <doug.duboulay@gmail.com> writes:

> I'm aware of the recent DocBook to WordML XSLT transformation efforts of Steve 
> Ball and Bob Stayton [1] and I'm aware of the older DSSSL stylesheets for
> transforming DocBook to RTF, but I'm curious about the deficit of XSLT 
> stylesheets mapping directly to RTF. 

If it's a deficit, then the DSSSL stylesheets have the same
deficit. Generating RTF from the DSSSL toolchain is a function of
Jade, not the DocBook stylesheets.

> Did anyone ever try to start such a thing and then abandoned it? 
> Was it just obsolete, trivial, irrelevant or impossible?
> Did DocBook to fo followed by fo to RTF give more useful results?

I've never tried fo to RTF, but it seems like it how useful the
results would basically depend on how good the fo to RTF engines
are (XMLMind and FOP are the only ones I can remember hearing
about) and how completely they implement the XSL-FO spec.

Anyway, is there a specific demand in the doc-authoring community
for RTF output? I understand that the developers working on the
DITA tools have put together a stylesheet that can convert DITA
source to RTF, but I'm not sure why. Have they also created a
stylesheet that can convert RTF to DITA?

I ask because it seems like the reason that users might want to
have a direct mapping of DocBook to RTF would be if they wanted to
round-trip their content in and out of MS Word or whatever. Doing
that would require them to also have a way to then save it into a
form that could then be converted back to DocBook.

For users who want that, the DocBook->WordML->DocBook stylesheets
that Steve Ball has been working on already let them do that.

So I think if anybody's asking "Does DocBook have off-the-shelf
support for conversion to RTF?", they maybe should instead be
asking if DocBook has support for conversion to a format that can
be opened directly in MS Word. To which the answer is that it
does, and that it goes even further by supporting "round trip"
conversion of that format back into DocBook. And that basing that
round-tripping process on WordML is maybe a bit more forward-
looking than basing it on RTF.

  --Mike

smime.p7s