Jennifer, In my experience, the only decent output from Docbook to Word is when you use XFC to convert the FO to RTF. The RTF output on FOP is not at all pretty ;-) However, if you use the personal version of XFC it stamps RenderX on the bottom margin, so you really should purchase XFC so that does not happen. Going from Word to Docbook without any restrictions is a bit harder. Copy and Pasting is way too tedious. What I have done to help convert existing Word docs to Docbook is to use Majix. (_http://sourceforge.net/projects/majix/_ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/majix/) ) However, I had to modify it to output clean Docbook that is ready to convert. You still have to go in and clean up some "FIX ME" spots, but it is much fast than any other method I have seen - and less restrictive. I can make this modified version available, since Majix has not been maintained for over 5 years. Dean Nelson In a message dated 9/24/2009 8:15:48 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
That's interesting. I tried it on Ubuntu Linux with OpenOffice 2.4.1 and it worked, opening my sample DocBook file as a word-processing document. When I tried on my Windows XP system, with OO 2.3.1 (what was installed there -- I don't use Windows very much and haven't kept it up to date), I had the same result as you did. Not sure if it is the version, the platform, or differences between the Windows and Linux environments. I had actually used OpenOffice to convert from MS Word to DocBook (with a bit of fixing up afterward, but still a lot faster than cutting and pasting between documents) and had noticed this feature described while I was researching how to do the conversions. I guess I didn't test enough before recommending it. Trying to move from a Word dominated environment to DocBook (or any real structured environment) is tough, and the round-trip problem is a big one. Bob Stayton actually worked on a set of transforms to go from DocBook to WordML and back. It is in the SourceForge stylesheets. Bob discusses DocBook and Microsoft Word on his excellent site at: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/MSWord.html The transforms apparently support a subset of the DocBook elements. He also mentions some other approaches. Regards, Larry -----Original Message----- From: Jennifer Moore [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 4:24 AM To: DocBook Apps Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Pasting footnotes from DocBook-generated HTML into OpenOffice Thanks Larry & Markus. That particular document is finished now (with a bit of manual tweaking at the end) - I was already very close to the deadline when I wrote here. But I'm still interested "for future reference" in the possibilities. Larry wrote: >> I am not sure which versions of DocBook and OpenOffice you are using >> or the platform you are working on, but OpenOffice can import some >> DocBook versions. You set the document type to DocBook in the Open >> dialog box and then open the XML file. Tried this. The Open dialog box did offer me DocBook, and it did open the XML file, but as XML! showing all the <para> tags and so on. Is there some other setting I need to use to make it behave as a final-formatted document? Jennifer -- www.uncharted-worlds.org/blog/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
