Homework from Open Publish 2005

2005-07-28

Yesterday I presented a tutorial on WordProcessing and XML. This is some homework.

First of all, I need to look in to Adobe InDesign, which is a desktop (and server) publishing application which is tipped to succeed both PageMaker and FrameMaker. There is at least one vendor here at Open Publish showing off a system that uses InDesign as the rendering end of a publishing process, where authors work in word processors, but I haven't seen it in detail yet. I'll investigate InDesign further, with the publishing team at USQ.

Secondly, there are a couple of omissions in my notes.

• My favorite way of exporting XML from Microsoft Word by transforming the broken HTML export format into well formed XML is described here in this article on xml.com.

• A similar approach is taken by this commercial package. I am dubious about some of the claims they make, though. This makes it sound a bit too easy: "You can also export to practically any Schema you wish by using W2XML's abilities to capture named styles within Word." I think mapping styles to XML is sometimes quite complex and frequently cannot be automated completely.

• For details on Microsoft's new XML format for Word, follow Brian Jones' blog.