Greg, One of the reasons that you don't see many tools for conversion is that it is usually a "one way" trip and after it is converted, it stays in Docbook. (at least in my world it does). However, if you want to make the round trip then the structure of the Word document needs to be controlled in a way that makes that possible - hence the "round trip" stylesheets.
I am moving Word docs into Docbook on fairly constant basis, but not back again. I use a Java based tool called Majix (majix.sf.net) which is a rather blunt tool, but it does help in the conversion to the point of creating valid Docbook files. From there I usually do a bit of clean up (i.e. changing a numbered list to a procedure, etc). I have also tuned that tool to create better output with less cleanup. Let me know if this is something that would work for you and I can step you through any issues. Regards, Dean Nelson In a message dated 05/06/10 13:30:24 Pacific Daylight Time, gpevaco writes: Howdy DocBook Community: I am new to DocBook, and also new to this forum. I have been going through the archives, and found some very interesting discussions. Primarily I am interested in moving/converting some documents from Word which they were authored in to DocBook. I have been looking at several tools to help in this process, and found some very good information here in the archives. One method which seems very promising is the docbook-xsl/roundtrip The discussion for this was from a few years ago. So I am thinking that the some of the style sheets may have changed with the docbook-xsl-1.75.2 distro that I have. The suggested conversions were: wordml-normalise.xsl, wordml-sections.xsl, wordml-blocks.xsl, wordml-final.xsl none of which I found in the 1.75.2 Instead I have xsl such as: normalise-common.xsl, normalise2sections.xsl, sections2blocks.xsl, and blocks2dbk.xsl It seems to me that this is just the logical evolution of the same xsl style sheets referenced in the archives from years ago. Does anyone know if this is indeed the case. Further there has been little to no discussion or even apparently any new tools regarding converting Microsoft Word to DocBook at least for quite a while. Corresponding roughly to the time when Microsoft Word started implementing XML or w:xml as I like to call it. It is still very ugly xml, and even though the new docx format is apparently valid XML it is still cumbersome to work with, at least in my opinion. Are there any newer tools designed primarily to work with the latest incarnation of w:xml or any techniques that could help the effort to get these docs into DocBook? I greatly appreciate any response! Thanks, /GregP
