Oxygen XML Forum

Ok, bear with me, I'm a total XML n00b.

I need to know if oXygen has the ability to automatically update XML files from MS Word files.

We are constantly making edits that require changes to our XML files for online distribution and are looking for a way to automate some of the more mundane edits we receive (namely punctuation). As of now, we have to make these changes manually and we want to be able to upload or open the Word document (source) and have the corresponding XML file changed so our editors' time can be spent making content changes.

The workflow looks something like this:

Word file with edits received--> Corresponding published (online) XML file opened in oXygen--> Edits manually entered--> XML Filesaved and a PDF copy is exported for our records--> XML File published (online).

I'm not sure if that makes much sense--I'm confused as well--but the goal is to automate some of the edits that don't require content addition or deletion.

Thanks for any help and advice in advance.

Hello,

I recommend keeping only one copy of each document, in XML format, and deprecate the DOCX format, which will negate the need for the continuous migration of changes from DOCX to XML. Visual editing, change tracking and user comments for collaborative review and other editing features are available in Author editing mode. These visual eding features should make this transition to XML editing smooth.

If you really need to keep both a DOCX version and an XML one for each document I suggest creating (and maybe debugging) an XSLT transformation that will transform the content of the document.xml file, that resides inside each DOCX document and that has a fixed element structure (which allows designing an XSLT transformation around this structure), to the corresponding XML document that is the source of your PDF and online published formats.


Regards,
Sorin

Thank you Sorin.

We'll give it a shot and see how it goes toward helping us with our automation issues.