What is WordMLToFO Stylesheet?

WordML is formally called "Wordprocessor Markup Language". Until now Microsoft Word has the main native file format called binary format (.doc extension) or Rich Text format (.rtf extension). WordML has an XML file format and is called fully compatible like these native file formats. In addition, WordML has the following features.

Unlike the binary format, the specification of WordML is published

• You can embed user schema tags in WordML which is impossible in RTF or binary format
• XML applications can easily access WordML files using XSLT

You can build XML applications based on WordML features:

• Applying XSLT stylesheet to the user XML documents, you can easily generate WordML files. You can view or print generated WordML files using Word2003
• Applying XSLT stylesheet to WordML files, you can generate XML files. It is very useful to convert Word documents stored in the corporate information system using WordML as a middle format when doing Word to XML document conversion
• Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas includes the document titled "Overview of WordprocessingML" that simply explains WordML structure and examples.

WordMLToFO Features

• Element mapping - WordMLToFO style sheet maps WordML elements to the XSL-FO elements in the following way
• Style expansion - Word document contains many styles and the styles are applied paragraph or text-run or table, finally they are formatted according to the applied stylesheet result. The style contains table-style, paragraph-style and character-style. In contrast, XSL-FO does not have style concept. All of the formatting property must be described as the last result in the FO file after applying the styles. As a result WordMLToFO stylesheet must apply following style, and then output the last result to the FO file
• Image file generation - As XML file cannot contain binary data images, WordML stores the image data using the Base64 encoded string data. Following is the sample. Element w:binData contains the image data portion
• Line space calculation - Microsoft Word has the complex line layout specification such as fixed line spacing, at-least line spacing, auto line spacing. WordMLToFO stylesheet computes line spacing to realize to get the same formatting result as exact as possible. But the formatting model differs between Word and XSL-FO. So we can not get the same formatting result in all case. NOTE: WordMLToFO stylesheet uses external Java library to process image file and line spacing calculation. If you use MSXML as XSLT processor, the stylesheet cannot call Java libraries, so you cannot use these functions

WordMLToFO Stylesheet Main