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Re: Working with Wordies ...

• From: harvey <harvey@e...>
• To: "Jonathan Robie" <jonathan.robie@d...>
• Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:14:46 -0400 (EDT)

I have successfully round-tripped Word change tracking on a custom
Word application by writing XSLT transforms from a custom schema
to WordML and WordML back to the custom schema and successfully
maintained the change tracking both ways.  This was relatively
painless.  Also, all the authors would be working in Word with
XML as the underlying datastore.

I have recently tried to do the same roundtripping for change tracking
with Docbook.  I have experimented using processing instructions for
the change tracking.  I have successfully gotten the conversion from
WordML to Docbook and the processing instructions are created.  I haven't
written the transform going the other way yet.

The biggest problem with the processing instruction approach is not
on the Word end but on the XML authoring side.  Some XML editors use
proprietary mechanisms for change tracking.  The problem that I
have seen is that the requirements for the data in the XML editor
and Word don't always mesh.  Using the processing instruction method
that I am using is great for Word to XML but it requires the XML
author a lot of pain and I don't think it is deployable without
some automation behind it to ease the pain on the XML side.

Betty


> I've been writing most technical papers in Docbook when I can. Lately,
> I've been collaborating with people, and all the versioning and tracking
> features of Microsoft Word are *very* useful, so I produce a draft in
> Word format, they start working on it, and from then on, we find
> ourselves working in Word.
>
> I don't see a way around this unless I type each change back into the
> original Docbook document. This seems like an inherent problem, but is
> there some smart trick I'm missing?
>
> Jonathan
>
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• References:
  • Working with Wordies ...
    • From: Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@d...>