Hi Mike, how many files are you looking to transform? We have done this (gone from an MS word document to XXE and docbook) but it was only for a single document. I used a text save and then wrote (first awk and then xslt) scripts to parse and transform the resulting XML document into more and more acceptable output. This would be unacceptable for anything more than a few files unless they were all exactly the same format. I would also advocate going to an intermediate format which only contains the "real data" and cuts out all the presentation stuff - for something that is poure documentation DocBook is brilliant, and yes it can easily hold the real information but I see it mainly as another step in the process of converting "real information" into what I want to present. Afterall Stylesheets are about presentation. All of the web available tools made an unacceptable/unusable mess of the source document.
Our document shrank from a 1.5 megabyte file downto a few hundred kilobytes, and now contains both English and German text. What I will say though is that when handling tables the conversion to docbook is "really ugly". The results are only acceptable when the original WORD document is consistiently structured. Ours was not so I was forced to reject the RTF variant in favour of plain text. Other benefits from using XML are cleaner rendering of tables, ability to generate marked up HTML/pdf, easy addition (and selection) of German text. All of which were possible with MS Word just not as straightforward. We also generate definition files (and test scripts) on the fly, something that used to be an error prone cut and paste job and not possible from WORD (I tried using visual basic but fixing the structure took too long). Hope this helps Cheers Graham
