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RE: Word and amazon.com (was: PDF a "book" of Word files )
Subject:RE: Word and amazon.com (was: PDF a "book" of Word files ) From:"Bill Lawrence" <scribe -at- matrixplus -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 9 Oct 2003 16:28:07 -0400
>
> 1. A situation in which someone (client, boss, CEO, whatever) wants
some
> content that you have written up in xml to be delivered in a specific
> _file_ format, like a DOC file (as opposed to html or pdf). Why would
they
> ask? I don't know, but I've had some weird requests lately for this
kind
> of thing so maybe that's why it came to mind.
>
> 2. I was wondering if there would be an _easy_ way to do this other
than
> building the XSLs, which require anywhere from a little to a lot of
> programming depending on the beast you're working with, or writing a
> program to do it, or even using something like Xalan.
Well, FOP (from xml.apache.org) can do XML to Framemaker MIF. There are
a couple of other open-source tools that can go to .rtf. But Word
remains something of a problem. I generally transform the XML to HTML,
which Word can open easily. I use a CSS stylesheet to govern the
formatting for that. The new architecture version of FOP, when it
finally comes out, is supposed to have .rtf capability.
> But now that I think about it more, I suppose this hypothetical would
rely
> on the XML doc being written in the order it should appear (for
example,
> chapter one then chapter two), in which case you're already violating
the
> "no format" law of xml because if the file were truly format
independent,
> it wouldn't matter if chapter two came before chapter one, the xsl
would
> sort it out........literally.
Exactly. My documents are written as individual modules at the topic
level. I assemble the topics in the proper order through a "driver"
file using Xinclude technology. So, I can rearrange the modules any way
I like.
By the way, if FOP was to actually arrive with real .rtf support, you
could use a driver file to set up the order of modules and create the
Word file.
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