Re: xml -> rtf

[Joe English <jenglish@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Johnson wrote:
>
> Sorry, I didn't put all of the background of my requirements in my original
> posting.  My real requirement is to return a .doc file from XML by means of
> an automated process.  I am looking at using RTF as an intermediary step.
> So, while opening HTML in Word would work as a manual process, it won't work
> for "lights out" processing.

It depends on what you want to do with the final .doc file,
and what the source document type looks like.

OpenJade can give you nicely formatted output (well,
as nicely-formatted as is possible in Word anyway :-),
but the result probably won't be suitable for further
editing by human beings since Jade's RTF backend doesn't
produce any stylesheet information.

The XML--(XSLT)-->HTML--(Word)-->.DOC route may preserve
a bit more of the source document's structure, limited
to what's expressible in the dialect of HTML that Word
understands.

The XML--(XSLT)-->RTF route will be excruciatingly painful
to implement for all but the simplest formatting requirements.

You should take a look at RATFINK [1] and see if that will
be useful for your application.  RATFINK is a Tcl library
for generating RTF; if you're comfortable with Tcl then
some combination of XSLT, Cost [2] and/or TclXML [3],
and RATFINK is what I'd recommend.


--Joe English

  jenglish@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

[1] RATFINK:	<URL: http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/cost/ratfink/>
[2] Cost:	<URL: http://www.flightlab.com/~joe/cost/ >
[3] TclXML:	<URL: http://www.zveno.com/zm.cgi/in-tclxml/ >


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