RE: Transformation Format

["DuCharme, Robert" <Robert.DuCharme@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>If you're asking the question, "how can I make XSLT output editable by
>Word?", as opposed to "how can I get XSLT to generate a binary format, for
>instance, Word's RTF variant?", you could use the ability of more recent
>versions of Word (Word 2000) to work on, and save to, HTML files, so you
>could output HTML or XHTML using XSLT.

Ahh, but you're dealing with Microsoft here, which means that you're playing
by different rules--rules that aren't, as far as I could tell, available to
look over!  At least MS publishes RTF specs; the "HTML" saved by Office 2000
is an ugly mix of XML, ill-formed HTML, scripts, and if statements inside of
square braces. 

I wrote an XSLT stylesheet to turn my own slideshow XML into the HTML that
PowerPoint 2000 reads and writes, so I'm more familiar with that than with
the Word 2000 HTML. I just reverse engineered it by saving a simple
PowerPoint presentation as "HTML" and removing as much as possible by hand,
putting a removed chunk back if removing it prevented PowerPoint from
understanding the file. 

Once I had trimmed it down as much as I could, I had my XSLT stylesheet
output these various chunks of stuff (much of which I could find no
explanation for anywhere at microsoft.com or elsewhere) in and around the
element content, and it all seems to work, although it's still far too messy
to show anyone else (and, some perl scripts are involved). At least I
finally got around to learning how to use disable-output-escaping, without
which I wouldn't have any hard returns in my final product. 

All that being said, I like to think that it will eventually improve, and
putting RTF that much further in the past is a step forward. I'm tired of
all those curly braces. 

Still, be prepared to be very patient for such an endeavor!

Bob DuCharme          www.snee.com/bob           <bob@  
snee.com>  "The elements be kind to thee, and make thy
spirits all of comfort!" Anthony and Cleopatra, III ii


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