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MartyRoss1-Visitor
1-Visitor
March 29, 2011
Question

Arbortext Export to MS Word, reprise

  • March 29, 2011
  • 13 replies
  • 4171 views

Hi,


We have a business requirement to export documents from Arbortext 5.4 M020 directly into MS Word format. What is the best we can do for this?


From what I've read, export to MS Word from Arbortext is only supported via RTF, taking care to use special "Word fields", "styles", "instructions" and/or stylesheets. And, even then, the Arbortext Styler Guide& Help files suggest there are plenty of limitations and "gotchas" lurking along this path.


One of our "power" users suggests she has used elsewhere a feature / add-on to EPIC / Editor that can be used to directly export to, or compose into, a Microsoft Word (i.e., ".doc") format. Does this sound familiar to anyone? What is she talking about? She can't remember the feature, but believes it may be a separately-licensed add-on.


Any tips or leads will be carefully followed up!


Regards,


-- Marty


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    largyres1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    March 30, 2011

    Fellow Adepter James Sulak inspired me to tackle the XSLT route to the Word 2003 XML format ("WordML"). With knowledge of WordML structure it's doable. Again, a simple doctype helps.


    See http://rep.oio.dk/Microsoft.com/officeschemas/wordprocessingml_article.htm


    The Word 2003 XML format is virtually the same as the fully-realized Office Open XML introduced with Word 2007, without the compressed container folder structure (so you can transform to a single flat XML file), and is seamlessly converted to MS Word 2007/2010 with the built-in converter.


    The main problems with the Arbortext ImportExport RTF export route are disappointing speed and expensive licensing. That said, we absolutely rely on ImportExport for conversion to XML of Word legacy and outside submissions. Only OmniMark is comparable as far as I'm aware.


    Again, round-tripping is fraught.


    Years ago I wasted a couple days looking at Word as an XML editor. It can do "user XML" as an overlay to the WordML but there's no real-time validation, poor performance, and no route back to Word from user XML.


    - Lou Argyres
    Continuing Education of the Bar - California
    2100 Franklin St, Suite 500
    Oakland, CA 94612
    Lou.Argyres@ceb.ucla.edu

    P
    ptc-30501501-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    April 7, 2011
    "Word is a Bad Idea (TM)"

    I'll have to remember that one. Word 2.0 was pretty good for anything up to about 50 pages...and that was the last time I chose to use Word professionally (personally anyway...still get stuck using it today depending on the client *sigh*

    Some of our operator manuals are in Word here *big sigh* (but they won't be any more - I set up stylesheets so they, too, can use the same XML) and we save to HTML, open in a browser, then cut and paste into a clean Word doc with a template with the styles we want to use. From there, it is just applying the styles one paragraph at a time.

    Of course, by Word 2007, this is a bloody nightmare in and of itself...why in the world does Word apply normal.dot to everything now? Oh but to have Word 2.0 back...

    John T. Jarrett CDT
    Senior Tech Writer, Integrated Logistics Support,Land & Armaments/Global Tactical Systems

    T832.673.2147 | M 832.363.7234 | F 832.673.2376| x1147 | -
    BAE Systems, 5000 I-10 West, Sealy, Texas USA 77474
    www.baesystems.com

    E
    ebenton1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    April 7, 2011
    Not only "Word is a Bad idea (TM)" but as Suzanne Napoleon says in her email sig, "WYSIWYG is last century technology".
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