[Jose Valdes[_3_]]

Thanks Peter! I'll try the HTML route!

"Peter Flynn" wrote in message
...
Jose Valdes wrote:
Peter,

Thanks so much for replying. I hope my fledgling XML questions have not
tested your patients. ;-)

Forgive my lack of clarity when I wrote, "when used in MS Word." I meant
to say that my completed manuals have to take the form of MS Word 2003
files. I can use a document type such as DocBook or DITA, but the
finished document must be MS Word. My company is not interested in XML
and I would have a hard time making the case for investing in any
additional tools such as specialized editors.

OK. You mean you'd have a hard time expecting *them* to invest in an XML
editor (cheaper than Word :-). I assume you yourself would be using one: I
have a hard time imagining people editing XML text in Notepad...

I hope I am not being dense, but I'm having trouble understanding how
I could use DITA, DocBook, or another document type to produce Word
files.

This is a common path, and the simplest way is to cheat. Write your doc in
DocBook or DITA or whatever. Write an XSLT transformation to very
carefully constructed XHTML with whatever styling is needed embedded in a
style element in CSS in the header. Rename the output file to end in .doc
and Word will open it as if it were a native .doc file, and your company
will be none the wiser.

I have several clients doing this all the time. The individuals (being
professional documentation engineers) refuse to use Word because it lacks
the depth required, so this device enables them to continue Doing It
Right, but lets their users continue to believe in Word. Where the client
needs PDF, they generate it from the XML. Ditto with HTML.

The "official" path is to write a (10000x more complex) XSLT
transformation to turn your DocBook/DITA into OOXML. This is perfectly
possible, just highly error-prone because of the complexity involved
(OOXML is an XML representation of how a Word file *looks*, rather than
what it *means*).

Scenario One: I could import a schema from DITA/DocBook into the Word
Schema Library, and use Word to apply XML elements to my existing
manuals. Within Word, I can perform XML transformations based on these
schemas, which would allow me to take advantage of single sourcing
features. If I understand it correctly, this scenario is possible for
DITA, but not DocBook because the latter uses DTD instead of XSD. Is that
right?

No. DocBook is defined and maintained in ISO RELAX NG, so it is available
in W3C Schema format as well as in DTD format. You could continue editing
DocBook documents using a DTD, and provided the document is valid, remove
the DOCTYPE Declaration and use the document with the correspondng Schema.

Scenario Two: edit XML files using an XML editor, perform all
transformations outside of Word, and import final version of manuals into
Word. In this scenario, I would not really be using Word.

Right. That's what I'm suggesting above, except that if you open the HTML
file in Word, and Save As....doc or OOXML, it seems automagically to
become a Word document. But test it in their version first.

Scenario Three: use IncludeText fields in Word files to take advantage of
the XML transformation available in these fields. This scenario is very
similar to the first one, and would probably exclude DocBook for the same
reasons, I think. ;-)

Are any of these scenarios feasible or worthwhile? Am I overlooking a
more sensible scenario? For now, I think I am going to focus on scenario
one and read up on DITA.

Try the HTML route and see.

///Peter