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Re: [xsl] Word -> XSL
Subject: Re: [xsl] Word -> XSL From: Philip Fearon <pgfearo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 14:45:19 +0000 |
Hi Len A vote for Option 1, WordML/SpreadsheetML (concentrating on Word here,but the prinicples are the same for Excel): Your best bet, in my view would be Option 1, to just use Word to visually design the menu templates with input from your customers, but if you have a choice, I would recommend Word 2007/Excel 2007 and OOXML, rather than Word/Excel 2003. As previously stated (by Emmanuael), XSLT on its own does not do search and replace, there are however tools (see below) that make it very effective at performing just this function, even if such files are compressed. Once you have a set of Word templates for all your customers, you just need to perform the equivalent of an XSLT 'mailmerge' on each Word template to update it with realtime data from your database. Your XSLT therefore only needs to modify the data within the tables (repeating rows etc) and not get involved in the visual aspects of WordML. There are methods also that can help with converting Word documents automatically to PDF In case you're interested in lightweight tools that may help with Option 1, especially if Word 2007 may be used in future (sorry about this, but there is some relevancy here): -------------------- In Feb I'm publishing the first beta of a new desktop XSLT 1.0/2.0 publishing/testing GUI (CoherentWeb) that works seemlessly with WordML and also compressed packages such as Word 2007/OOXML. For OOXML, it uncompresses only the required zip entries - such as document, header etc, on the fly, and then reinserts the transformed XML into copies of the original Word documents (its multi-threaded, and a 1000 Word templates at a time, flat or within a folder structure wouldn't be an issue). A .NET implementation of the EXPath Zip Module (expath.org) is also integrated with the product, this provides added flexibilty when manipulating zip compressed files. This tool will also comes with a built-in XPath dev tool (derived from my SketchPath tool) that may help with auto-generating the rather long-winded XPath expressions you may need for WordML. [Finally, this tool has a built-in Word/Excel XSLT result preview, this exploits Internet Explorers ActiveX hosting so uses a tiny registry hack (published by Microsoft) and woud need a licensed copy of Word/Excel on the same platform. The Word 2003 XML viewer has not been tested yet for this, but may just work because its also browser hosted] -------------------- So far as how much effort might be involved with the XSLT. Provided that (as described above) you design the Word templates manually and only use XSLT for data insertion, the XSLT dev effort should be minimal, because its effectively a search and replace job, and you can auto-generate the more length WordML/Word2007 XPath expressions. Regards Phil Fearon http://www.qutoric.com On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Schultz, Len <len@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hello, > > I am building a web application that will allow restaurants to easily create custom beverage (e.g. wine) menus utilizing a central database of beverage products. Key to this is making it really easy to have each restaurant specify and implement their look and feel into their menus. The effort needs to be extremely light weight: we'll have to do potentially 1000 different menu templates for 1000 different restaurants. FYI, today 90% of menus are done in MS Word, another 9% done in MS Excel, and the remaining 1% is probably Adobe InDesign, Quark, and MS Publisher. > > I want to implement this using XML and XSLT. The question I have for this group is the plusses and minuses of 2 different targets for the transformation. > > Option 1 is to transform to WordML and SpreadsheetML. This has the benefits of 1) having the restaurant send us their design in Word/Excel, then all we have to do is create an XSLT to replace the data. And 2) if there are changes or adjustments to make in the layout, the restaurant can then make those changes in Word/Excel, and we just create a new XLST. > > Option 2 is to transform to XSL (aka XSL-FO). This has the benefits that 1) we can transform to PDF, which would cover the 1% that don't have Word/Excel. And 2) we can keep people in our system to make. But I don't know how we can easily create the XSL from sample menus sent to us in Word. I also don't know what kind of layout change process would work (our web application might need to be robust enough to allow users to fine-tune layout changes online) > > I'd like to tackle the first issue first. Does anyone have insights into how XSL could be created from a sample Word document, and the effort involved in creating that XSL? > > --len
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