Re: [docbook-apps] Problem with tables and roundtrip to WordML

[David Hinds <dhinds@23andme.com>]

Ahh, that helps.  Previously, I'd been using asciidoc's docbook output, which uses <simpara> in table cells, but that also didn't work.  I'd based my minimalist example on the sample table markup at 
http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/table.html, which does not use the 
<para> tag.  

I'm expecting that getting table formatting right is going to take some work.

-- Dave

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 12:56 PM, Steve Ball <Steve.Ball@explain.com.au> wrote:

Hi David,

Although I have not yet checked, I believe the problem is that the content of the cells is not in a <para>. That is, your DocBook should look like:

<thead><row><entry><para>a1</para></entry><entry><para>a2</para></entry></row></thead>

    <tbody><row><entry><para>b1</para></entry><entry><para>b2</para></entry></row></tbody>

As for being able to produce professional looking tables, there is some work to do in setting up table column widths and borders properly. However, YMMV.

Cheers,

Steve Ball

On 01/03/2011, at 7:16 AM, David Hinds wrote:

I'm trying to convert a very simple docbook file to WordML using the roundtrip XSL stylesheets.  I'm having trouble with tables: all cell contents are missing after the conversion.

Here is my input document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN" "http://www.oasis-open.org/doc\
book/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<article lang="en">
<table frame='all'><title>Sample Table</title>
  <tgroup cols="2">
    <colspec colname='c1'/><colspec colname='c2'/>
    <thead><row><entry>a1</entry><entry>a2</entry></row></thead>
    <tbody><row><entry>b1</entry><entry>b2</entry></row></tbody>
  </tgroup>
</table>
</article>

This renders ok in HTML with:

xsltproc --path .../docbook-xsl/html -o test.html \
  docbook.xsl test.xml

but with this:

xsltproc --path .../docbook-xsl/roundtrip -o test.wml \
  --stringparam wordml.template template.xml \
  dbk2wordml.xsl test2.xml

the cells in the resulting table are all empty, i.e. the resulting WordML looks like:

            <w:tc>
              <w:tcPr>
                <w:tcW w:w="" w:type="dxa"/>
              </w:tcPr>
              <w:p/>
            </w:tc>

I get the same result with either xsltproc or saxon.  I am using docbook-xsl-1.76.1.

My long term goal is to be able to programmatically generate reports as templated, styled Word documents from asciidoc source files, with docbook as an intermediate format, in a linux environment.  I need relatively few features: headers, body text, simple bullet lists, PNG images, and reasonably professional-looking tables (where that means I need control over column alignment and borders). 

-- Dave