Used properly, Word can be an excellent tool, especially for short, "structured" articles. Half the battle is going through the effort to create and encourage use of templates (meaning a *.dot file). It takes about 2 minutes to remove offending buttons and menus from the template, and buttons that may have redeeming value (such as the bullet button) can be changed to invoke a style (List Bullet) rather than a fomat override (default behavior). Buttons can also be created to apply appropiate heading levels, and macros can be written to do reasonable levels of business rule enforcement (the unstructured equivalent of following the DTD). With reasonable care, consistent Word==>XML conversion is both practical and highly realiable with a minimal investment in Word VBA--no RTF output or proprietary tools required.
Beyond basic template stuff, you can also consider developing form-based interface in one of two ways. First is an MS-Word form itself. This works well where it fits, but the form functionality leaves a bit to be desired. For example, a form field will not allow you to enter paragraphs. A less restrictive and rather neat approach I picked up once from former colleagues at Standard & Poor's is to use a blank MACROBUTTON field to create what appears to the author to be boilerplate. The template can have things like: "Title" (MACROBUTTON field with label "Title") Empty space for author to fill in title "Author" (MACROBUTTON field with label "Author") Empty space for author to fill in author etc With content entered into the template, an extraction program can retrieve content simply by finding adjacent fields and picking up anything in between. Having said all this, a short structured article is one thing. A complex tech manual written in docbook is quite another, and Word should never be confused with a real XML editor. Harv Greenberg Project Manager Xyvision Enterprise Solutions, Inc. 30 New Crossing Road Reading, MA 01867 USA (1) 781-756-5589 http://www.xyenterprise.com -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
